Saint Francis Xavier Mission

The Saint Francis Xavier Mission, in Lewis County, Washington three miles north of present-day Toledo, Washington, was the first Catholic mission in what is now the U.S. state of Washington and is now the oldest Catholic church in the state. The first Mass was offered there December 16, 1838, by François Norbert Blanchet, who co-founded the mission with Modeste Demers, Although that is considered the founding date, the mission cemetery predates the mission as such, having been started by the Hudson's Bay Company approximately in 1831. The mission, which originally occupied 640 acres of Cowlitz Prairie, is also known as the Cowlitz Mission and, especially by members of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, as Saint Mary's after a girl's boarding school that operated there from 1911 to 1973.

Here and elsewhere, Blanchet used a visual device known as the "Catholic Ladder" as a means of instruction about the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church.