St. Francis Lutheran Church
St. Francis Lutheran Church is located at 152 Church Street, between Market Street and Duboce Street in San Francisco, California.[1] The church building has stain glass windows and Memorial Terrace outside.
St. Francis Lutheran Church was built in 1906 by immigrants from the Nordic countries, where Lutheranism is the largest religious group. The Danes carried the main responsibility for the project. The church was built in the heart of what was then the Nordic-dominated Duboce-Market neighborhood of San Francisco.
The brick and wood frame of the St. Francis Lutheran Church building survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and then was used for several months as an infirmary. Following the 1906 earthquake - the same year -, the Finns founded the Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley, at University Avenue, where the Lutheran congregation still operates today.[2]
66 years before the erection of St. Francis Lutheran Church, the very first Protestant church on the Pacific Coast was erected by the Finns and Swedes and other Lutherans who worked for the Russian-American Company, which was established in 1802. That first Lutheran church was the Sitka Lutheran Church in Alaska, built in 1840.