Who was Santa Clara Anyway?

We're surrounded by saints in the Bay Area — Francisco, Carlos, Bruno, Cruz, Mateo, Ramon, Leandro, Jose, and of course, Clara.

But do you know the stories behind the names of so many cities in Northern California? Here's the skinny on Santa Clara, a woman so special she has a city and a county named after her:


Santa Clara, Spanish for Saint Clare, also known as Saint Clare of Assisi, was born in 1194. According to NewAdvent.org, she is believed to be the first woman to ever write a monastic rule, hers the Rule of Life for Franciscan women.

She showed a heavy interest in prayer and religion as a child and ran away to follow Francis at age 12, where she was hidden from her parents and put under the care of Benedictine nuns. 

In adulthood she developed her own order, still known today as the Poor Clares or the Order of Saint Clare, which tallied over 20,000 nuns in 2011. 

The Poor Clares were built on the idea of corporate poverty — refusing one's own possessions. Several popes tried to pressure Saint Clare into dropping that tenet of the order, but she continued promoting the idea of "joyous poverty" until her death in 1253 at the age of 59.

Over 500 years later, in the late 1700s, a Spanish Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra came to California, which was then a part of Mexico, and began establishing missions to try to convert natives to Christianity. One of the missions, located in present day Santa Clara (city), was called Mission Santa Clara de Asis.

According to SCU.edu, the mission was meant to cover the area from Palo Alto all the way down to Gilroy — similar to the current Santa Clara County borders.

In the early 1800s, the Mexican government sold off church lands, and when California became a state in 1850, Santa Clara was among the original counties.

So next time someone asks you, "Who was Santa Clara, anyway?" you can give them a little inside info and impress them with this fact: Even though Saint Clare practiced joyous poverty, the poverty rate of Santa Clara County in 2012 was five percent lower than the state average.