Behind the Scenes with Research Librarian Frances Kaplan

Recently we sat down with California Historical Society’s Research Librarian, Frances Kaplan, to discuss the rich stock of resources available to the public through the North Baker Research Library.

The North Baker Research library is a “special collections library,” can you explain what that means?
A special collections library is different from a lending library which would cover a vast range of topics. Ours is a research library where people come to do more in-depth research on collections that we have in our archives. Our focus is only California, which is bigger than a lot of places but smaller in scale than what many other libraries may cover. We house diverse collections that people can view and study to help them draw their own perspectives of the history of California.

What’s the difference between CHS’s library and a regular public library?
At a public library you generally don’t have rare materials and it’s usually a lending library, meaning they let you take the books home with you. We don’t loan out our materials because they are rare and unique. We are similar to some universities which will have a library for student use but also have special collections that focus on one area, for example the labor archives at SF State.

What does the public have access to through the North Baker Research Library?
We have more than half a million photographs as well as 35,000 books and 4,000 manuscript collections, plus maps, ephemera, posters, broadsides, periodicals, newspapers, and the Kemble Collection on Western Printing and Publishing. The bulk of our collections date from the 1860’s through the 1970’s, but we do have some very early manuscript material from when California was still part of Mexico. The public has access to everything in our vaults if they come visit during the library’s open hours. Anyone can visit the library and request to see a collection, which we will then take out of the vault for you to explore. People can also access our collection through the digital library, where we are rapidly digitizing material, and we have an online catalog which lets you see what we have and what you might want to look at when you come for an in person visit.

Can you talk a little more about the work you and the rest of the library and collections staff are doing to make our collections accessible to people who might not be able to physically visit our space?
We realize that it’s getting harder to get to San Francisco and difficult to stay here a long time, especially if you are a researcher exploring a specific topic. We want to, and are in the process of, digitizing as much of our collection as possible. The library is an intermediary between someone wanting to find information and the vaults below us where the information might be and so we want to make accessing those amazing resources as easy as possible. We do have to uphold a very deliberate process though, because the moment that we digitize something it becomes its own object that needs to be preserved and cataloged. There are also sometimes copyright and third-party rights that need to be addressed before a digital image is displayed online. Also some things you just can’t digitize, they’re too fragile, they’re oversized, or they might be thousands of pages long. So what we try to do is prioritize our digitization needs. Things that are older or more fragile need to be digitized sooner rather than later so they are handled and worn less. One example of a collection we recently digitized is the Peoples Temple collection. In this instance we felt it was necessary to digitize the photographs in the collection first, allowing people access to them immediately for research and learning purposes. That became a priority over the manuscripts materials, of which there are over one hundred boxes. The entire Peoples Temple collection is, however, open to researchers who visit our library.

Who comes to the library?
We get researchers from all over the world, we get people who are interested in their family genealogy, we get people from SF and the Bay Area who are interested in their neighborhood or their building history. We also get a lot of people from out of state or country who have a research topic in mind. We recently had a researcher from South Africa and spend a few days in our library looking over plans, drawings, and manuscripts related to water projects by a Californian who worked for a period of time in South Africa. There was also a professor from New Zealand who flew here to go through records we hold by the American Civil Liberties Union-Northern California. We also see a number of students, predominantly at the college and graduate level, but we welcome elementary and high school students as well! CHS is the source of material for lots of research that turns into books. So many of the books on our library shelves are by authors who came to the library seeking material from our collections in order to write their book. We also see a lot of documentary film makers here, as well as architectural historians, and journalists who are usually covering some aspect of local history.

How do we get our collection material?
Our original collection came from C. Templeton Crocker who, in 1922, donated his collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, and periodicals emphasizing overland travel, California’s transition from a Mexican province to statehood, and the Gold Rush. CHS has continued collecting with a focus on the documenting the diverse history of California.

When we acquire material to be added to our collection, it goes through a very stringent process because we want to make sure that we can take care of it, preserve it, and that it fits into our collection scope and policy.  Unfortunately, we can’t take everything and that means we do have very specific criteria for accepting things.

What is your role at the library?
I see my role as one of public service. I am part of the public face of the library and the first person people come across if they have a question they need to find an answer to, whether in person or by phone or email. I am the person that they can talk about their project with and discuss what they are hoping to find. I am able to show them how to use our catalogs or let them know more about the items they are interested in, and if we don’t have anything that meets their needs, I can let them know about what other institutions and archives might be able to help them. So it is my job to connect people to the right institution and the best place in order to find what they are looking for – whether that be the history center at San Francisco Public Library, the archives at UCSF, or one of the many wonderful special collections held at the University of California libraries or the California State University libraries. For many people, they need to go to more than one place if they want a variety of information because much of it is scattered across different archives.

Can you highlight something interesting from our archives that you’ve been working with recently?
We are constantly digitizing and cataloging and finding items in our collection that we didn’t necessarily know were there. The goal is that everything that we keep here ultimately has a description that people can see through the catalog on our website. We have a rare book cataloger, we have a manuscripts archivist, someone who works exclusively with photographs, etc.

A few items recently came to me through our rare book and printed material cataloger. He stumbled upon this pamphlet of Camp Curry in Yosemite from 1912. This is so timely, because right now we have an exhibition up about the Transcontinental Railroad, which made Yosemite easier to get to and more accessible that it is now in many ways. In the pamphlet they have a bit about how you can go by rail and then by stagecoach - “people may obtain stopover privileges on their transcontinental tickets at Merced. Then they changed to Yosemite Valley Railway or take a Pullman Car directly from either San Francisco or L.A.” So that’s how they got there in the olden days which makes it a lot more accessible in some ways than it is now.

Other things we might have had in our collection for a long time but because we have so many items, I don’t know them all. Sometimes when a researcher requests something, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. This is occurred recently and I was surprised to discover the original drawings by Donald Graham Kelley of the official California Bear design for the CA state flag. These are the original illustrations from 1952. It’s so cool because it allows you to follow the design process. You see that Kelley was commissioned by the government to create this and then you see scientific feedback on the bear figure from Tracy Storer, professor of zoology at UC Davis, based on the initial sketches that were sent over. 

Every now and then we discover material within our vaults that we didn’t realize even existed because it was hidden inside another collection. Thus was the case with this one last item I am intrigued with – it is a photographic album of images of Clark’s Waterworks from 1890-1891. This company existed before all of the other waterworks systems in San Francisco. It was a private enterprise from really early on. Clark owned a bunch of Eureka Valley and Glen Park and started his own waterworks business, damning and pumping water from that area and supplying it to the people around him, before the city owned the water systems.

We invite you to visit us at the North Baker Research Library at 678 Mission Street in San Francisco, Wednesday through Friday, 1PM to 5PM. You can access our digital library here and our online catalog here. The University of Southern California has also digitized and maintains images from our collection which can be found here.

Grafton Tyler Brown: African American Artist

Grafton Tyler Brown 

By Dr. Robert J. Chandler

Grafton Tyler Brown was born February 22, 1841, an artist. Incidentally, he was African American. His parents Thomas and Wilhelmina Brown, were, according to the census, free blacks from Maryland. His father’s free status, however, is questionable. One of Grafton’s brothers stated firmly, Dad came from that hotbed of secession, South Carolina!

Grafton grew up in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, during the 1850s. The decade before the Civil War was one of the darkest ones for African Americans in our history. The Compromise of 1850 brought California into the Union came with an enforced Fugitive Slave Law that actively encouraged kidnappers. President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian like Brown, encouraged the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that effectively declared that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect. Controlled by the same Southern slavery-supporting Democratic Party, California’s laws mandated segregation and denied black testimony in the courts of justice.

Grafton Tyler Brown

http://www.blackpast.org/aaw/brown-grafton-tyler-1841-1918

The Browns wanted a future for their eldest son, and in 1858, dispatched him by steamer to California. Grafton went from one state capital to another, working at a steward in a Sacramento hotel. Within a year, Brown proved that talent, not color was destiny.

In 1859, the Sacramento Union, California’s paper of record, noticed an “excellent painting” when the St. George Hotel displayed the self-taught Brown’s drawing of a steamship. The 1860 state fair remarked similarly about his railroad locomotive.

Virginia City, Nevada Territory, 1861; drawn by Grafton T. Brown, lithograph by Charles Conrad Kuchel. 

The optimistic and aggressive Brown confidently promoted himself through life, forever seizing opportunity. In the late 1850s, the lithographic firm of Charles Kuchel and Emil Dresel dissolved. They had produced over 50 magnificent views of California towns and cities. When Dresel left to become a noted Sonoma winemaker, Kuchel fell on hard times. He hired young Grafton Brown to be his traveling sketch artist and salesman, the man who convinced townsfolk to buy his view and pay more for border vignettes of their businesses.

What was the racial status of Kuchel’s new employee? In Sacramento, by the 1860 U.S. Census and city directory, Grafton Tyler Brown was African American. Likewise, in the early 1870s, that census, a credit report, and years later, a former employee knew Brown’s racial background. Few cared. In the 1861 San Francisco directory, which designated “colored” residents, Brown was white. He steamed down river and “passed” into the majority. Brown carried on businesses successfully for 55 years.

In the spring of 1861, our self-assured 20-year old was in boomtown Virginia City, Nevada Territory, sketching the town and selling border views. In 1864, he returned to draw the second view of that great Comstock Lode town. It appeared in two versions, each with different border views. In between, Brown sketched Portland, Oregon, and Santa Rosa, California.

Bird’s Eye View of Santa Clara, California, (transaction date 1869)

Lithograph

California Historical Society; X57-88-1-2 

As talent triumphed, Brown took cover within the racist Democratic Party. Befitting any man, Brown probably voted at age 21 in 1862. In 1864, he lithographed a portrait of the Democratic presidential candidate, and later quickly registered under California’s new 1866 registry law.

Following Kuchel’s death in December 1864, Brown purchased the business from his widow. His Democratic Party contacts aided him to become the state’s first African American contractor. In 1870-1871, he lithographed 7 tideland sale maps for commission chairman Benjamin Franklin Washington. Who was Washington? The publicly racist editor of the San Francisco Examiner, the Democratic Party newspaper.

Map of land of the Market Street Homestead Association. G.T. Brown & Co., Lith. 1867.

Lithography—drawings and etchings on fine-grained limestone—came into prominence in the 1870s. Its versatility for curves and drawings supplanted letter-press work for invoices and stock certificates. The use of large stones made “stone printing” ideal for tinted city views, chromolithographic posters, membership certificates, sheet music, and especially real estate maps. Brown’s small job office of 4 people in 1870 and 8 people in 1878 excelled at this job work and Brown installed a steam press to do it.

Map of land of the Noe Garden Homestead Union, San Francisco. G.T. Brown &; Co., Lith. 

Brown out-designed his competitors, whether letter press printers or other lithographers. He went head to head with the much larger, older, and most reputable firm, Britton & Rey, founded in 1852. Joseph Britton and Jacques Rey did quality work for decades, as holdings in the California Historical Society’s Kemble Printing Collection show. An artistic feast lays in the stock certificates by these two completing firms during Nevada’s 1870s mining boom. There were no other challengers.

Map of Oakland and Alameda. G.T. Brown & Co.. lith. ©1878.

As the 1870s closed, Brown transformed into an artist. He sold his lithographic firm and drew views for the San Mateo County history (1878) and Nevada (1881). In 1882, Brown stepped into being a landscape oil painter, with fine oils of Lake Tahoe, followed by sojourn in Victoria, British Columbia. This month, the University of Victoria puts on the first show of Brown’s work since he displayed 20 scenes in 1882.

View of Lake Okanogan, B.C., 1883

Oil on canvas

The Center for African American Decorative Arts 

Brown’s artistic career lasted until 1891, as he followed the Northern Pacific Railroad, painting landmarks around Tacoma, Washington and Portland, Oregon. In 1886, Brown found his scenic home at splendiferous Yellowstone National Park. Then in 1892, those rails carried him eastward to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he and wife Albertine settled. A stint as a draftsman for the Army Corps of Engineers led to longtime work in St. Paul’s public works office.

African American born Grafton Tyler Brown knew he was an artist. He faced the world confident he would succeed. He did.

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Dr. Robert Chandler worked for Wells Fargo Bank for 32 years as a historian and is past president of the Book Club of California. He has written many articles about California history on the period from 1850-1880. His book on Grafton Tyler Brown was published by Oklahoma University Press in 2014.

Exaggeration Cards

Minnesota has Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. Florida has its gators, the world’s largest reptiles. And, of course, they say that everything is larger than life in Texas. But in California, home of the world’s tallest trees and an agricultural wonderland, it’s the plant life—cultivated or wild—that grows really, really big.

Image manipulations began long before the digital magic of Photoshop made it possible for everyone to become visual fantabulists and tellers of tall tales. A prime example can be seen in the exaggeration (tall tale) postcards that first appeared in Fresno in 1905. The appeal of outsized produce and livestock struck a chord throughout the West, where many printers began publishing “Bunyonesque cards utilizing props and darkroom legerdemain,” as Lewis Baer of the San Francisco Post Card Club has described the cards.

CHS’s exaggeration cards are pristine, never-scribbled-on, and never-mailed examples of the maker’s craft. They are mostly the productions of the San Francisco printer Edward H. Mitchell. Part of CHS’s Kemble Collections on WesternPrinting and Publishing, these and more postcards are accessible to researchers in the North Baker Research Library at our headquarters in San Francisco.

 

Kemble Ephemera Collection

The California Historical Society has recently made available a finding aid to our extensive Kemble Ephemera Collection on the Online Archive of California.  The collection, dating from 1802 to 2013, comprises a wide variety of ephemera pertaining to printing practice, culture, and history in the Western Hemisphere. Here is only a very small sample of some of the ephemeral materials found in the Kemble Collection. 

A.C. Studios, Designers, Lithographers, Illustrated Map Makers, Oakland, California

Types from Solotype, Oakland, California

The Stanley-Taylor Company, San Francisco, California

Crown Zellerbach Corporation, San Francisco and Los Angeles, California

View the Kemble Ephemera Collection finding aid HERE.

Entry by Jaime Henderson, Archivist at CHS