Celebrating the start of two railroad exhibitions with our San Francisco community

One hundred and fifty years ago, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in North America signaled the closing of the American frontier and the ability to travel from coast to coast quickly and with more ease than ever before. In recognition of this anniversary, the California Historical Society (CHS) presents two simultaneous exhibitions that examine the history of the railroad in California and beyond: Mark Ruwedel: Westward the Course of Empire and Overland to California: Commemorating the Transcontinental Railroad. Last week all of us at CHS had the pleasure of celebrating the opening of these two exhibitions with our members, VIP guests, and staff!

In his series Westward the Course of Empire (1994–2008), photographer Mark Ruwedel documents the physical traces of abandoned or never completed railroads throughout the American and Canadian West. Built in the name of progress as early as one hundred and fifty years ago, these now defunct rail lines are marked by visible alterations to the landscape. Ruwedel catalogues eroding cuts, disconnected wooden trestles, decaying tunnels, and lonely water towers in quietly powerful images that point to the contest between technology and the natural world. Using a large-format view camera, Ruwedel treads the same territory as nineteenth century survey photographers, but his contemporary perspective brings a sense of loss to landscapes once viewed as exploitable resources.

Overland to California: Commemorating the Transcontinental Railroad draws from the California Historical Society’s vast archival and photographic collections to consider the railroad’s impact on the industry and culture of California. Featuring photographs, stereocards, historical objects, and ephemera, this exhibition explores how the major railroad companies used marketing images to bolster their reputations and promote their lines in a period of rapid growth and social unrest. Overland to California will also examine the railroad’s complex labor history, taking into consideration the immigrant populations who built its infrastructure, as well as the scandals surrounding the monopolistic practices of the so-called “Big Four” railroad executives: Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.

The exhibition features important archival material from CHS’s permanent collection including a mammoth plate photograph by Carleton Watkins of a helix-shaped stretch of track known as the Tehachapi Loop, as well as a first edition copy of Frank Norris’ 1901 novel, The Octopus. Also being exhibited on select viewing days is a 9.25 ounce gold spike, the last to be driven into the railroad that connected Los Angeles and San Francisco on September 5th, 1876, thereby joining Los Angeles to the East Coast. The spike was donated to CHS by an heir of railroad magnate Charles Crocker in 1956. It will be on view during special events throughout the exhibition.

Last Thursday night's opening included remarks by Managing Curator, Erin Garcia, as well as CHS’s Director of Library, Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs, Susan Anderson. Food was provided by Straw Carnival Fare, with refreshments from Fort Point. Guests also enjoyed jazz by Francis Wong and Karl Evangelista.

 

Westward the Course of Empire and Overland to California will remain on view at CHS’s headquarters at 678 Mission St. in San Francisco until September 8, 2019. Please visit californiahistoricalsociety.org or call us at 415 357-1848 for more information.

Want to hang out with us at fun history events like this one? Join today!

Images courtesy of Shannon Foreman photography

Teaching California at California Council for the Social Studies conference 2019

On March 15th, California Historical Society Reference Librarian (and super colleague) Frances Kaplan and I traveled to the annual California Council for the Social Studies (CCSS) conference to promote CHS’s new curriculum project, Teaching California. Each year, the CCSS conference aims to deliver professional development for educators focused on new scholarship, research-based strategies, and networking -- all designed to improve the teaching and learning of history/social studies across the state. Held in San Jose this year, CCSS 2019 was filled to the brim with presentations, workshops, and exhibitors, and was well-attended by educators from across the state.

Shelley Brooks, California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) Program Coordinator, previewing student and teacher resources found in Teaching California’s instructional materials focused on the California Missions (taught in 4th grade).

Frances and I presented at two separate sessions (one aimed at the elementary school-level and one at the high school-level), each together with members of our Teaching California curriculum partners at the California History-Social Science Project. In these sessions, titled “Teaching CA: Bringing Archives into the Classroom,” we introduced teachers and administrators to our project, a joint collaboration between archivists, librarians, educators, and subject specialists.

Our goal is to empower teachers to engage in inquiry instruction that is aligned to California’s new History-Social Science Framework, improves student literacy, and supports civic learning and engagement. In both sessions, teachers practiced the historical investigation process and, excitingly, previewed some of the inquiry-based lessons (and primary sources!) that we are creating for the project. Here are more scenes from our sessions:

Tuyen Tran, Assistant Director of CHSSP, going over the basics of California’s new History-Social Science Framework. Teaching California will create Framework-aligned materials that will aid in school and classroom implementation.

“I just think this is planting beautiful seeds for the power of using primary sources.” Overheard in the elementary #TeachCa intro session with @CAHistory here at #CCSS19. pic.twitter.com/MtUSMHoWtH

— CHSSP (@CHSSP_SO) March 15, 2019

A closer look at a draft of one of our Teaching California lessons, called “inquiry sets,” for the second grade, which includes both primary sources and contextual information aimed at both students and teachers. This set includes a handwritten note on a collar produced during the 1906 earthquake and fire, from CHS's collections of California history.

Elementary school teachers review drafts of Teaching California’s second-grade instructional materials, which includes never-before-seen objects and photographs from CHS’s collections.

Taking back so many AMAZING resources from #CCSS19 to use with preservice teachers in my upcoming Teaching H-SS class at CSUSB! Thanks for sharing resources @CHSSP_SO @lcccarrillo @historytechie @UCBHSSP and, especially, @r10CLIC! pic.twitter.com/x4qdZxIJKJ

— Michelle Lorimer (@LorimerHistory) March 18, 2019

Learning about the exciting partnership between @CHSSP_SO and @CAHistory. Teaching CA: Bringing the Archives into the Classroom (U.S. High School) at California Council for the Social Studies 58th Annual Conference https://t.co/iWR8Y4FNLH @casocialstudies #ccss19 pic.twitter.com/4rTKA97wot

— Wendy Rouse (@WendyLRouse) March 15, 2019

First glimpse of #TeachCa with @CAHistory here at #CCSS19! HS teachers check out cholera source set. @CaEdHSS @UCDHistProject @UCBHSSP @UCLAHGP pic.twitter.com/V0EJcG5WrA

— CHSSP (@CHSSP_SO) March 15, 2019

To view the slides for one of our CCSS sessions on Teaching California, visit this link.

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This post comes from Kerri Young, Teaching California Project Manager. You can reach out to her at kyoung@calhist.org

Glimpses of Paradise

There is a church a block away from where I live. I go there to visit a tree. One of its branches has descended upon the earth, bending heavily from its weight; a forked stick helps support it and hold it up. I also go there to see a spirit mural. It is a beautiful mosaic of a white-tailed dove crowned with what I imagine is intended as a symbol of the holy spirit. Some may interpret it a phoenix rising. Its tail spreads across four columns of the church, spawning various symbols—hearts, shells, angels, and my favorite, a couple - the silhouette of a man and a woman. My idealist self places her fingers on the shadowy figures and yearns, wishing for these symbols to materialize into existence. This idealist yearning, this ideal is something like the glimpses of paradise that I see in the eyes of the believers in Peoples Temple, particularly in the photographs of the children, the dancers, and the older women who believe in the possibility of healing, of all races coming together as a unit under the banner of love.

Child with baby sloth, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 6; California Historical Society.

What is Peoples Temple? Difficult question. Difficult and perhaps impossible to answer. The more you learn about Peoples Temple, the more questions begin to multiply and answers become hazy. Working on the Peoples Temple Publication Department records, a project funded by the National Historical Records and Publications Commission (NHPRC), has provided me with some insights into this important time in history. It’s worth keeping in mind the context of the photography prints--they were designed to serve the Publications Department’s purposes including fundraising, church member activities, public relations, and community outreach.

Working on the Peoples Temple photographs and some of the textual material gives one a glimpse into the ideal that was sought from its conception. Perhaps you come upon a beautiful child taking a stroll in the jungle at Jonestown, discovering a flower and pausing for a moment to consider it and hold it with care.

Child with flower, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 6; California Historical Society.

One might come upon an image of a troupe of African American dancers in exuberant dress, striking a pose with raised fists, a symbol for Black power. Their youthful energy electrifying you and making you remember what it was like to yearn for equality, making you still yearn for it like the dream lives on.

African dancers, circa 1975-1976; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 2; California Historical Society.

Then there is the look that the woman at church gives her pastor, in whom she places her complete trust. So what if he is forged from another clan, another color? He has embraced you and accepted you and welcomed you in this space that you believe is your new home. Your history is a heavy tree branch that needs holding up a bit.

Woman at church service with Jim Jones, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 31, folder 2; California Historical Society.

Some observers like to fixate on the end, but sometimes forget to consider or question the beginning and the ensuing journey. What impetus drove this engine? We cannot dismiss the importance of symbols and the meaning they carry in our frail vessels. We yearn for community and company. The photographic prints and textual material in the newly processed Peoples Temple Publications Department records are a testament to such yearning. Whether one considers the tragic end, regarding it as a warning not to trust those who claim benevolence and promise protection then betray such a trust, or whether one suspends their disbelief and allows the yearning to take hold through the eyes and deeds of the beholder, one may catch a glimpse of paradise. A glimpse of paradise in the sense that, look—it can be all simple, we can all work together under the same roof, share the same land and space, dance to the same drum beat. Yet this simple thing eludes us continually so we are always just catching glimpses of what could be.

Two youth in Jonestown, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 4; California Historical Society.

But ... what if we were to reframe the question? What if we were to temper our idealism with a dose of realism? As I was contemplating the Peoples Temple after processing the photo prints, a play titled Tetecan: An Aztec Tragedy, from another of CHS’s collections caught my eye in the vault. I opened it to the foreword, which besides some anachronistic observations on the Aztecs, had something interesting written there:

“Each of us in his destined hour, in hope or extremity, mounts the steps of idealism. In all times and places, fervid youths have climbed in search of idealism, driven upward by sight of the seething plain of life across which the light of brotherhood appears at times to burn fitfully. Too many of them have climbed in vain.”

Sometimes the young of spirit desire to undo the imperfect system that keeps the light of brotherhood from burning with a peaceful flame. We dare give birth to hope and begin to climb the mountain of idealism, leaving the plain of life behind; almost obliterating it and starting anew with our own thoughts, on our own terms, seeking like-minded people. We want paradise on earth, now. We tire of waiting for elusive promises. This, however, can be a dangerous proposition. Humans are imperfect beings embedded with foibles and faults, often drawn to extremes. Often reacting to others’ extremes—from greed to idealism. The lessons imparted to us in the narratives of the Peoples Temple and those who seek to explain the church are often extreme, understandably mirroring such narratives. But what about the lessons imparted in the brief glimpses of the promise of paradise the eye may draw from some of the photographs? Can anything be extracted from these? Even if there’s a strong possibility that some of it was curated to fit the purpose of publication?

I think there is something important to be extracted from these brief glimpses. I think part of the lesson lies in contemplating the extremes, sure, but also, considering the journey in between, the fissures where love was let in. This is a quiet journey that involves reflection, pause, and silence.

Church members praying during service, circa 1965-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 9; California Historical Society.

Processing the Peoples Temple photo prints was something we took our time with. We sleeved some of the larger prints, housing them in new folders while keeping categories labeled by the publication department or creating new folder categories if they reflected a theme such as with the “African Dancers” folder. For some of the smaller prints such as passport photos or member photos we opted to house these in envelopes to keep them from falling from their folders…. I wanted to contain the photographs as if I could contain the spirit of the lives reflected there. I wanted to keep a level of privacy and respect to Temple members photographed even though their lives have become very public. Sometimes it’s the smallest details that show people we care.

The Peoples Temple photographs give us glimpses of a paradise the youth in us has yearned to see. But did many of them climb in vain? I like to think that the climb was not in vain. I like to do a challenging thing—to turn from the sensationalized end and pause a bit to study the faces of the people whose life held meaning and the potential for a longer, better life. The idealist in me keeps searching for these glimpses, hoping they bloom and multiply and one day materialize like during my yearning by the spirit mural. The realist in me, however, reminds herself to also temper such yearning given the nature of man and its excesses. It’s a challenging task—to both acknowledge the end, to grasp the fitful yearning of utopia so as to temper it and prevent it from happening again, but also to not forget the fissures and glimpses of paradise where life and love seeped through.

Woman with baby girl, circa 1974-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; Box 30, folder 4; California Historical Society.

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Written by Lynda Letona, Assistant Archivist & Reference Librarian at California Historical Society (CHS).

Photos digitized by Marissa Friedman, Imaging Technician and Cataloger at CHS.

A finding aid for the People Temple collection can be found here.

References:
Brown, Hugh. 1950. Foreword to Tetecan: An Aztec tragedy. San Francisco: Bohemian Club.

Photographic Prints, circa 1965-1978; Peoples Temple Publications Department Records, MS 3791; California Historical Society.

The processing of this collection was made possible by funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

California Historical Society's Recently Cataloged Maps

Among the 5,000 to 6,000 maps in the California Historical Society’s collection are many examples of rare and unique titles. Below is a sampling of a few recently cataloged items:

1. An interesting manuscript Map of St. Louis, surveyed and drawn by Asa F. Bradley, dated 1850. The developers of the proposed settlement had grand plans for a relatively large (103-block) town which included wide diagonal streets and a central plaza. It was located south of the City of Sonoma and is currently of much more modest in size. Over the years it was known as Saint Louis, Saint Louis Landing, San Luis, and currently Embarcadero. The map is in pen-and-ink.

2. Plan of Marysville lays out all the city blocks, lots and squares. It was published in Marysville by Eddy Brothers, Stationers, and was beautifully lithographed by Alexander Zakreski in San Francisco. Zakreski (or Zakrzewski, 1799-1863) was a Polish emigrant and skilled mapmaker and lithographer. The map is on indefinite loan to CHS from the De Young Memorial Museum.

3. A Map of a Portion of the Hock Farm surveyed by Nelson Wescoatt in 1857 and drawn in 1860. Sutter Hock Farm, north of Sacramento on the Feather River, was the first non-Indian settlement in Sutter County and was established in 1841 by early settler John A. Sutter. The hand-drawn map, in pen-and-ink and watercolor on cloth, includes a beautifully decorated north arrow. It was given to CHS by F.S. Hudson in 1946.

4. Another colorful manuscript map entitled Map of All the Swamp and Overflowed Lands in Santa Clara County … 1868 to 1872 was drawn by the County Surveyor A.H. Parker. It shows lots, land owners, land grants and watercourses. The map includes a table of surveyor’s courses and distances and is drawn in pen-and-ink and watercolor on cloth. 

5. An Outline Map of Southern Central California Showing Railroad and Steamboat Routes, although undated, was probably published in the 1880s by Wallace W. Elliott & Co. in San Francisco. Counties are hand colored.

6. Hill Street, 6th to 10th St[reet]s, Los Angeles, California is one of about 130 blueline print maps covering business districts in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada drawn by Coldwell, Cornwall & Banker (later Coldwell, Banker). This one is dated July 1938 and shows individual businesses with lot sizes. Firms shown include The May Company and Bullocks department stores and the Los Angeles Theater.

Slightly over half of the CHS maps that have been cataloged over the last three years are unique to WorldCat (the world’s largest library catalog). That is, at the time of cataloging no other library had created records for these maps. To date 3,200 maps (or about two-thirds of the collection) have been cataloged. Records for them may be found in our online library catalog as well as in WorldCat.

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Written by Philip Hoehn

Reading Pictures

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eaves-drop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

—Walker Evans, ca. 1960

Looking is hard work. For many of us, sight is the most obvious tool we use to experience our world; it feels easy, automatic, almost like breathing. But to look—to take time, to probe, to take seriously the ways in which images shape our worldview—is a different matter.

As children, we are taught to read words when we are only a few years old. And yet, modern technologies make it so that we are increasingly inundated by pictures more than text, be it on our screens, in print media, as family photographs, or as advertisements. Moving through the world, it is tempting to merely glance at the pictures we encounter, letting them coalesce into a sort of landscape or wave that washes over us and passes us by. But pictures are made by people, and so often convey the ideals, biases, and political views of their makers. However subconsciously, the images that we see every day combine to shape our own biases and political views. “What you see often becomes a part of your memory,” explains Ana-Christina Ramón, the assistant director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “and thus a part of your life experience.”

When we look closely and think about what we see, it allows us to be less immediately manipulated by the visual rhetoric of the media that we consume. But as with any good book, reading images closely can bring us an immense sense of pleasure and empathy. Imagine standing in front of your favorite painting, and taking the time to think about what emotions or forms its brush strokes evoke. Try to imagine what the artist was thinking and feeling when she put the brush to canvas, and where she was standing; think about what the painting conveys about the era or place in which it was made. With these thoughts, we do not lose sight of the work’s initial beauty. Rather, we can take in this beauty, or pain, or anger and confusion, while also asking ourselves what it is that allows the art to make us feel so strongly. We can come to the work with a sense of humility, but also thoughtfully.

I’m going to walk you through some questions I ask myself when I first look at a photograph, painting, or illustration, in the hopes that you will continue to look closely at the pictures that you encounter—be it in the museum, or on your phone’s screen. For example: 

[Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33]; by Anton Wagner, CHS, PC 017

First, take a minute or two to really look closely at every part of the photograph. What do you see? I find it helpful to speak out loud, or at least to organize my thoughts into coherent sentences so that I don’t miss anything; language helps me to process what I’m seeing. No observation is too small or too obvious. In this photograph, I see four little girls standing on a dirt road. The girls stand in front of two buildings, one built in a midcentury American ranch style, and the other built in an Asian architectural style and surrounded by a fence with an elaborate entryway. On the left hand side of the image, I see a large white water tower on big metal stilts. On the right, a tree leans into the frame. The trees, combined with the fluttering of the girls’ hair and coats, suggest that it was windy out that day. There are statues in the garden behind the fence, and telephone poles in the distance. In fact, one telephone pole leads my eye to another building that I didn’t initially see.

What is the image made of? This work is obviously a photograph; knowing what I know about photography, I know that it is a black and white gelatin silver print. This information can help me to determine when the image was made: gelatin silver prints were most commonly made between 1900-2000, which is a fairly broad range, though we have other context clues to help us determine the date, such as clothing and architecture styles. If I can hold the image, I like to think about who else might have held it, and why, and how it might have circulated or travelled. This photograph could have been a family photograph, or a journalist’s image, or a photograph made by a documentarian. Maybe it was stored in an album, or printed in the newspaper.

If I’m looking at a photograph, I ask myself where the photographer was standing when they took the picture, and why. In this case, the answer is not particularly complicated: the photographer is standing in the road, and photographs the children from an angle. But this simple observation can actually tell something about the photographer’s intentions. Why didn’t they take the photograph head on, and from a closer vantage? What does the angle afford us that a more direct composition would lose? And what do we lose from this perspective?

However simple, the last question can tell me so much about this picture and the person who made it. I can guess that because the photograph is not a close up view of these children’s faces, it was composed specifically to show them in the context of their surroundings. Rather than frame the image so that we can only see the Asian-style building, however, the photographer chose to juxtapose it against the adjacent ranch-style house and water tower, both of which suggest to me that the photograph was taken in the United States. This isn’t a close up portrait of four children; it’s a photograph of four children shown living in a diverse neighborhood, likely in the United States. Their clothing and the architecture surrounding them suggest that this photograph was made before or during World War II. They look like they are of Japanese descent, which makes me wonder if they were impacted by Executive Order 9066. I think about the immigrant experience in the United States, now and throughout this country’s history; I think about my grandfather who was detained by the United States government during World War II because he was an Italian immigrant, and how he never told his children, or spoke Italian in their presence.

You can see here how an unassuming image without any text or caption can still say so much.

I’ll show my hand, which is that we are fortunate to have some information about this photograph. The photograph is titled [Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33], and was taken by the German photographer Anton Wagner. As an art historian, I’m lucky when I have this much information to go off of: knowing the photographer allows me to probe deeper into his background and intentions, and the title can tell me so much, not least the fact that the building shown is a Buddhist temple, and that the photograph was taken ca. 1932-33 on Terminal Island—a Japanese American fishing community that, as it happens, was the first to be evacuated following Executive Order 9066. But I believe that pictures can tell us so much more than any caption can.

My last piece of advice is to try to look with a close but curious eye. Pictures do not exist solely as a record of the past, or as a container of information and data. A picture is not a question to be answered; we do not look so that we can be “right.” We look because photographs and works of art have things to tell us about what it felt like to live in an earlier time, and about how we relate to people with whom we have seemingly little in common—be it these four little girls, or a painter, or a sculptor living in Athens in 500 BCE. They allow us to admit just how much we don’t know, and to feel vulnerable when they elicit emotion. I believe that looking closely at pictures make us more human, in increasingly technological times.

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Written by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator at California Historical Society

Pioneering Black Urbanites in San Francisco and Los Angeles

In the 1850s the new medium of photography, along with written and oral transmissions sent all over the United States, began to shape impressions of the new state of California and its two most prominent and rapidly growing cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. As this new visual, oral, and textual image making was occurring, African Americans such as Mifflin W. Gibbs and Robert Owens were negotiating their rights as citizens to shape the region’s development as they pursued greater opportunities for economic advancement, social freedom, equity, and self-reinvention in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively.

Like many white Americans, Gibbs and Owens were lured to the state for its opportunities and “the good life” imagery produced by writers, painters, and photographers, and used by various boosters promoting migration to the state. The stories and imagery of Gibbs, Owens and other African Americans who participated in various phases of the western migration and settlement continue to remain largely absent from the dominant mythologies and history surrounding the western migration, notwithstanding investigations of the black West published during the last 50 years.

Although slavery was not allowed, the 1850 California constitution limited voting and the right to testify in court to whites, excluding African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians despite the fact that —San Francisco, the gateway to California—was one of the most racially and ethnically diversity cities in the world. By 1860, 75% of the black population in the North American West would reside in California, mostly in the northern part of the state. By 1900, this distribution would change and Los Angeles would become home to the largest black population center in the North American West. Despite their nominal freedom in California and racially discriminatory legislation they confronted, African Americans found refuge in western urban life which was abundantly more congenial than the places they left behind.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915) 

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915). A black entrepreneur and civic activist in California and the North American West.

Born to a free black family in Philadelphia, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs’ life experience in his formative years, carpentry training, a literary society education he gained with the successful businessmen, leaders, and elites of the black Philadelphia community appear to have provide him with a good foundation for his life. After developing as a self-employed carpenter and contractor, voting rights activist, and member of the anti-slavery movement which included public speaking engagements with William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass, in 1849, Gibbs realized he was at a crossroads in his young adult life. In 1850 he sailed to San Francisco from New York to join the gold seekers in northern California. Gibbs joined many other black men who immigrated to California from New York and Massachusetts that year, all of whom would become involved with resolving black issues across the state. In the antebellum period these men and others—including Robert Owens and his family—comprised the first voluntary African American migrants to the West. These black Americans migrating to California from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1940s would have been courageous, ambitious, resourceful, and adventurous.

After arriving in San Francisco, Gibbs worked as a bootblack. Though trained as a carpenter, he could not find work because white employees on these jobs refused to work with him. He eventually partnered with Peter Lester, an expert bootmaker and fellow Philadelphian who Gibbs had known from abolitionist movement work, in a successful retail and wholesale business called Pioneer Boot and Shoe Emporium at 638 Clay Street. Servicing patrons from Oregon into Mexico’s Lower California, the successful venture sold fine boots and shoes imported from Philadelphia, London and Paris.

Book cover of Shadow and Light: An Autobiography by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. He was a black entrepreneur and civic activist in California and the North American West

By 1856, Gibbs co-founded the Mirror of the Times, the first black-owned newspaper in California and west of St. Louis. As a leading member of San Francisco’s black community, he became an influential voice in the fight for African American freedom and full civil rights. Gibbs and Lester found good financial opportunities in San Francisco, he recounts in his autobiography, Shadow & Light (1902), but they continued to contend with ostracization, assaults where they had no redress, disenfranchisement and were denied the right to vote, sit on a jury or testify in a court of law. In the 1850s, he became a leader of the statewide California Colored Conventions, the first organized, civil rights protest and petition campaigns in the West with the goal to overturn the discriminatory laws that had been passed by the California legislature since 1849. Although not successful, regionally and nationally, Gibbs and his fellow travelers helped raise the social political consciousness about black and other nonwhite groups’ struggles for equality, civil rights, and the benefit of just government. The discriminatory laws and the increasing hostility towards black Californians during this era pushed Gibbs to join a mass migration of African Americans from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia in 1858. Once there, they developed businesses and supplied labor during the Cariboo Fields gold rush near the Fraser River. Significant resolution of the discrimination issues occurred in the 1860s due to California and federal legislation, and African Americans’ emancipation at the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Cover of the Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California held in Sacramento, CA November 20-22, 1855. At the first statewide Colored Conventions in Sacramento in 1855 and 1856 (followed by San Francisco in 1857), in addition to other objectives, black Californians pushed for reform in the court testimony laws for nonwhites. Education and a black press were also discussed intensely at the Convention in 1856. In the first two Conventions, Thomas Rix (or Thomas J. Ricks) was appointed to collect signatures in Los Angeles County.

Robert Owens (abt. 1806-1865)

As Gibbs was settling in and exiting San Francisco, Robert Owens and his family were thriving in Los Angeles. Born enslaved in Texas, Robert Owens earned money to purchase his freedom along with that of his wife Winnie, and their three children: Sara Jane, Martha, and Charles P. They migrated to Los Angeles and became residents in 1852-1853. Initially in Los Angeles, Owens worked odd jobs, and Winnie as a laundress. Eventually he won government contacts with the local U.S. Military post to supply cut wood, mules, and cattle that provided resources for him to open a livery stable and cattle sales venture that employed ten vaqueros (cowboys). Owens sold his products to the public on San Pedro Street, near what is today is known as the Little Tokyo neighborhood. He also invested in real estate throughout Southern California.

The Robert and Winnie Owens home became an early gathering place for religious, social, and business activities of the African American community in Los Angeles. Robert and Charles Owens, the Rowan family of San Bernardino, and white allies facilitated the important emancipation struggle of Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818-1891) and her family. Fourteen people were freed from enslavement by a January 1856 court case overseen by Judge Benjamin Hayes in Los Angeles, unlike many other enslaved people who attempted to attain freedom through the courts and lost.

Robert Curry Owens with his wife Ann, and daughters Gladys and Manila L. in a 1905 in the Colored American magazine. Robert C. Owens was the child of Charles P. Owens and Ellen Mason Owens (later Huddleston after she remarried following Charles P.’s death in 1882). The Owens-Mason clan was one of the wealthiest and most influential African American families in Los Angeles from the 1850s to 1920s

Charles Owens (d. 1882) and Ellen Mason (b. 1838), the eldest children in their respective families, married shortly after Ellen was freed in August 1856. Their union bore two children, Robert Curry (b. 1858) and Henry L. (b. 1860). Charles saw to it that his wife Ellen and their sons received formal education in the public schools of California with the highly regarded African American leader and educator Jeremiah B. Sanderson in Oakland and Stockton. Charles worked with his father and carried on the family business ventures after Robert Owens died in 1865 at the age of 59. It was noted at the time of the elder Robert Owens’ death that he was respected by all sectors of the multiethnic and mixed race city, and considered the wealthiest African American in Los Angeles. Upon Charles’ death, his wife Ellen and son Robert Curry Owens carried on the family business in conjunction with her mother and his grandmother, Bridget “Biddy” Mason. The family would continue to reap financial gains in the Los Angeles real estate booms, and became one of the wealthiest and most prominent African American families in California and the West into the 1920s, with Robert C. Owens being described as the most influential black man in California and the West. By the early twentieth century, stories of the Owens-Mason clan’s business success and philanthropy had a favorable impact on attracting African American migrants seeking better lives from across the U.S. Despite racism and discriminatory obstacles from 1850 to the twenty-first century, successive members of the Owens-Mason clan have survived, thrived, and shaped Los Angeles, California, and the West to this day.

An early photograph of Los Angeles: Six men stand outside of the Magnolia Saloon at New High Street and Marchessault Street, Sonora Town, 1885-1887

The stories of Mifflin W. Gibbs and Robert Owens and his clan expand the narrative of California’s early statehood to include the diversity of people who contributed to its development and to American society. Their stories should become part of the collective memory of the nation.

Bibliography
Beasley, Delilah. The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Fairfield, CA: James Stevenson Publisher, Reprinted 2004.

Bond, J. Max .“The Negro In Los Angeles,. Ph.D. diss University of Southern California, 1936.

Campbell, Marne L. Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850-1917. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Daniels, Douglas Henry, with forward by Nathan Irvin Huggins. Pioneer Urbanites, A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

De Graaf, Lawrence B., Kevin Mulroy and Quintard Taylor, ed. Los Angeles/Seattle: Autry Museum of Western Heritage/University of Washington Press, 2001.

Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar, with an Introduction by Booker T. Washington and an Introduction to the Bison Books Edition by Tom W. Dillard. Shadow & Light, An Autobiography. 1902 edition inscribed by the author; Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books Edition, 1995.

Lapp, Rudolph M. Blacks in Gold Rush California. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom, The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier, African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

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Written by Alison Rose Jefferson, MHC, Phd

Alfred Stiles: A Boy’s Adventurous Journey to California

Children’s Voices in the Archives is a series of posts brought to you by CHS’s North Baker Research Library. Stay tuned for more charming examples of history through a child’s eyes in the coming months.

Alfred Stiles’ diary reads like a mini adventure novel written from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy traveling from Boylston, Massachusetts on a ship headed to the Golden State. His sharp prose and keen observations may surprise you, not to mention his recording of details that veer into the journalistic then make a sharp turn towards the poetic. You might not think there would be much to do or observe on a ship’s long journey from Boston to San Francisco by way of Cape Horn (Dec. 1849 - June 1850), but even within the first few pages of Alfred’s diary, an avid debate club springs to life--the Cheshire Debating Club--to which his parents belonged. Alfred’s parents debated questions such as “Should the U.S. acquire the state of California?” Alfred diligently recorded the yeas and nays--his father in affirmative with 2 others and “Mother in Negative + 2 others.” They debated whether the acquisition of California would be of any benefit to the U.S.

Cover page, 1847; Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1856; MS 4014; California Historical Society.

Passenger list, 1849-1850; Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1856; MS 4014; California Historical Society.  

Christmas and New Years did not go by without incident. Alfred notes some rowdy behavior on Christmas Day when “2 thirds of the passengers drunk besides Capt + mate + 1 or 2 hands the mate pulled Choate from port hand of the forecastle and struck him several blows on the head, when some of the passengers cried out ‘throw him overboard’” he left for his cabin. Amidst the blows and drink, Alfred reports they had 2 pigs for dinner and apple duff.

On New Years, “About 2 clock a man had 4 bucket served at his head and a few other things which created a great excitement.” One diary entry records Tuesday, January 1st 1850 as evincing a light breeze and people wishing each other a happy New Year, with some passengers wishing to have a Heigh ride at home while it is as warm as July. Next Alfred describes fresh pork and apple pie for dinner, as well as doughnuts for supper with the addition of black fish.

We also find moments of quiet admiration and reflection where whale watching upon the ship Cheshire reminds the reader of Moby Dick. Alfred writes in another entry, “Thursday dec [?] very sick passengers most all sick saw some whales about 3 miles off” then on the opposite page of the diary, the lone word Whale crowns the page of text like a chapter title.

Whale title heading, 1849-1850; Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1856; MS 4014; California Historical Society.  

On a separate entry, we find a lovely poem titled “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” where Alfred transforms into a caged eagle amidst scattered waters and a dull unchanging shore.  [See end of blog for poem transcription]

“A Life on the Ocean Wave” poem, 1850; Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1856; MS 4014; California Historical Society.

Some pages turn to odes yearning to find wealth in California, followed by a nostalgic homecoming. In the first stanzas Alfred reminisces upon pleasant times spent with loved ones, then the promise of “gold dust” in the eyes. This follows another line in which the writer waxes poetic about soon reaching San Francisco and fulfilling the fantasy of seeing “gold lumps there” on the streets ready for picking “off the ground,” as if the streets were lined with gold nuggets to fill one’s pockets full of riches to return home in glory.

Odes “Oh! California,” 1850; Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1850; MS 4014; California Historical Society.

Reading Alfred’s diary, whether you are an adult, teen, or child, will take you on an adventure from East to West Coast during a time when the promise of safe harbor in a new land might be your heart’s desire.

Poem Transcription for “A Life on the Ocean Wave”

A Life on the Ocean wave !!!!

A life on the Ocean Wave
A home on the rolling deep
Where the scattered waters save
And the Winds their [revels] keep
Like an Eagle caged I pine
On this dull unchanging shore
Oh! Give me the flashing Brine
The spray and the tempests roar
Once more on the deckd hand
Of my own swift gliding craft
Set sails farewell to the land
[May] the gale follow far aloft
We shoot through the sparkling foam
Like an Ocean Bird set free
Like an Ocean Bird our home
We find far out on the sea
The land is no longer in view
The clouds have begun to frown
But with a stout Vessel and Crew
We’ll say let the Storm come down
And the song of our hearts shall be
While the sounds and the waters save
A life on the heaving Sea
A Home on the bounding Wave !!!!!!

Alfred L. Stiles Ship Cheshire April 24, 1850
From Boston Bound to California


Transcription of Odes of yearning to California

I thought of all the pleasant times
We’ve spent together here
I thought I ought to cry a bit
But couldn’t raise a tear
The pilot bread was in my mouth
The gold dust in my eyes
And though I’m going far away
Oh! Brother don’t you cry

Oh! California

I soon shall be in San Francisco
And then look all around
And when I see the gold lumps there
I’ll pick them off the ground
I’ll scrape the mountains clearing logs
I’ll drain the river dry
A pocket full of rocks bring home
Lo Brothers don’t you cry

Oh! California


Alfred L. Stiles Ship Cheshire

From Boston Bound to California Feb. 20, 1850 Lat 36 25 South

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Written by Lynda Letona, Assistant Archivist & Reference Librarian at California Historical Society (CHS).

Photos digitized by Marissa Friedman, Imaging Technician and Cataloger at CHS.

Reference:
Alfred L. Stiles diary and letter, 1849-1850; MS 4014; California Historical Society.

Digital Curriculum Educator Survey Results from the Teaching California project

With a summer 2019 launch on the horizon, the California Historical Society (CHS) is continuing work on the Teaching California website initiative, which will provide California classroom teachers and students with curriculum and primary sources tied to the state’s recently adopted History – Social Science Framework.

Our team has the pleasure of working with the web development firm Navigation North on this project, who have been helping both CHS and our content development partners at The California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) think through how we might build an experience around the grade-level instructional materials we are creating, called “inquiry sets,” for teachers and students in a classroom setting. An initial piece of research that helped us explore this was a Digital Curriculum Needs Survey, which Navigation North created and CHSSP and CHS distributed to teachers late last year.

This survey sought to find out how teachers, and particularly History-Social Science teachers, are currently searching for curriculum materials online, what their level of proficiency with technology is both in and out of the classroom, and the variety of materials they are looking for online. Thanks to CHSSP’s extensive teacher network, we were able to collect responses from more than 300 educators! The chart below exhibits the categories of teachers who responded:

The results were a revealing look the current relationship that teachers have with online resources in the classroom.

Above, the results show that personal use of technology outpaces professional use, meaning that strong adoption of technology in teachers’ personal lives does not necessarily transfer over into their professional processes.

Here are some other high-level takeaways from the survey:

Mostly Veteran, Secondary Teachers
Over 50% of respondents are long-time instructors (+57% = +15 years experience), teaching in single-subject assignments at public middle / high schools (+78%).

Most Believe in the Instructional Value of Teacher Technology Use
Over 80% of respondents claim that technology as an instructional planning, delivery, and differentiation tool translates to High or Considerably High Instructional Value.
Over 95% claim technology can/does help them provide more diverse learning materials and, in turn, diversify their teaching for improved outcomes.

Little Professional Support and Coordination
Most teachers (+88%) work in schools where there is little/no planning and sharing on effective use of technology in the classroom. And most (+77%) say they are expected to learn new technologies on their own outside of school hours.

Student Use of the Internet Has Benefits, but Requires More Work for the Teacher
Overall, respondents cited higher levels of motivation, collaboration, and student work products when using the Internet.
These benefits are coupled with more teacher work to monitor for plagiarism and use of unreliable sources, yet, +73% feel that student access to the internet does NOT result in increased discipline issues.

Teachers Regularly Turn to the Internet for Curriculum
+79% search for online curricular resources several times a week or more for their classrooms.

Teachers Are Looking for A Variety of Curricular Resources and Like to Use Search Terms
From worksheets to assessments and lesson plans to primary sources and media, teachers are looking for everything but use open search terms far more than standards, frameworks, or topic lists. 

For a full summary of the results, please go here.

Stay tuned for more updates on the Teaching California project on our blog!

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Written by Kerri Young, Teaching California Project Manager at California Historical Society.

The Disappearing Photos of Peoples Temple

Among our collection of Peoples Temple Publicity Department materials is a group of ruined photographs – some faded completely to white, others thickly scattered with flaking pigment, a few recognizable but chemically streaked and melted. These photos are relics of the Temple’s practice of faith healing. It’s well known that Jim Jones’ flamboyant “healings” were at the center of Temple culture, drawing crowds to services and converting many curious visitors into serious believers. Less well understood, however, is the fact that Peoples Temple offered the service through the mail.

A few of the "disappearing photos" that sent to the Peoples Temple mailing list

This is hard to imagine in today’s connected world, but the Temple was many things to many people, depending on whether you attended services, when you joined, and whether your primary interaction was through the Peoples Temple mailing list. Without much opportunity for members to compare stories, Jones could present his organization to different people as a leftist utopian movement, a mainstream Christian church, an anti-Christian church whose pastor mocked the Scriptures and claimed to be the only God his followers needed, an ecstatic Pentecostal-style revival, or a low-key prosperity gospel ministry.

It was the latter that dominated the mailing list, which sent out a beautifully designed monthly newsletter. This mailer would usually include a donation request, and often also a small relic – a piece of Jones’ robe, a flask of holy oil, an anointed penny – which was said to give the recipient luck, or send material rewards their way. CHS’s “disappearing photos” of Jones were included with the mailer in August 1974. Believers would place the images on affected parts of their body and watch the images vanish as a sensation of healing washed over them. In reality, the photos had been intentionally developed so that they would fade on exposure to light – but the effect, to a sick and desperate person, must have held great emotional power.

The mailer itself stops just short of claiming that the photos could heal, or even of telling the recipient how to use them (in this way, the Temple avoided outright mail fraud). It does, however, include a number of testimonies which explicitly explain that when the image was touched to a sick or injured body, the image disappeared and the body was healed. The testimonies provided both verisimilitude and deniability for the Temple.

Peoples Temple monthly newsletter, August 1974

We have no way of knowing how many photos were kept as personal mementoes, how many were discarded after they appeared to work (or not work), and how many were ignored, but we do know that many of the used photos were sent back to the Temple. Some were accompanied by brief testimonial letters, others only by notes scribbled on the envelopes, and others arrived with no writing at all, just a blank and silent image.

Today, the photos convey a strange sort of emptiness. Unlike most photos, they were never important for the images they carried, but for their power as objects. Ephemeral things are always emotionally powerful; think of the autumn leaf, or cherry blossom, that makes us feel both melancholy and buoyant. In the case of the photos, their creators designed them to self-destruct in order to give them a feeling of holiness. Now, however, that emotional power is spent. These empty sheets of photographic paper have no meaning left at all.

This leaves an archivist with a question. Do we hold on to these items? If objects from the past don’t speak, do they have a place in the library? Most people assume that an archivist’s job is to hold on to everything from the past, to take care of the past so that other people don’t have to think about it. (Witness the way the word “archive” is used in email and project management software – essentially, to mean “send this to a place that I’ll never see, but don’t delete it.”) In reality, archivists let things go all the time – and usually because they don’t bear information. Why would a librarian maintain a blank book?

The question isn’t quite as simple here, of course. These photos are more comparable to a large collection of empty, mass-produced blank books, like unused diaries. They’re poignant, but in ways that we may think we understand better than we do (we don’t know why the people in my example bought diaries, or why they never used them). There’s always a danger, in reading history, of filling in your own emotional context when there is none to be had.

In the end, we discarded many of the photos. We kept a substantial number of them, both to testify to their emotional resonance with Temple members and to preserve the information that some of them had written on their backs. But when it comes to conveying the vanishing of meaning, we’ve found that twenty blank pieces of paper are as powerful as a hundred.

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Written by Isaac R. Fellman, CHS's NHPRC Project Processing Archivist

The processing of this collection was made possible by funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

The Legacy of Carleton Watkins

Carleton Watkins is something of an enigma. Very few letters written in his own hand survive, leaving historians and early photography enthusiasts to fill in the gaps of his life and career. This makes some of the concrete details of his life surprisingly hard to pin down. According to various sources, he is either the oldest of eight children or the youngest of five. He arrived in San Francisco in 1851…or was it 1849? Accounts of his life are filled with hedges (“1855-61: Photographed New Idrea and New Almaden mines and Mission Santa Clara (according to Turill)’’ says one chronology) and guesses. Information presented as fact may not actually be, which can make writing an account of his life (my task as Project Archivist at California Historical Society) somewhat difficult.

His name, when placed next to that of his contemporary, Eadweard Muybridge, recedes. Muybridge, an Englishman whose motion studies of Leland Stanford’s horse Occident and moving zoopraxiscope are often credited as the beginning of motion pictures, seems to get all of the glory. Muybridge was a more colorful character. He changed his name several times, from Edward James Muggeridge to Edward Muygridge to Eadward Muybridge, in what seems to be the slow and iterative perfecting of how he would prefer to be known – as if he at all times had one eye fixed on his own greatness. At one point, he signed his photographs “Helios” (“Titan of the Sun”). He murdered his wife’s lover but was acquitted for what, at the time, was considered “justifiable homicide.”

Interestingly, the differences between the two artist’s statures seem to be archival matter. Watkins famously lost the contents of his San Francisco photography studio during the 1906 earthquake, just before he was to transfer the archive to Stanford University. Tyler Green writes, “In fact, just a week before the earthquake, a curator from the university had visited Watkins…in preparation for the university’s apparent acquisition of Watkins’s archives, the first time an American university or museum would recognize a photographer’s importance in such a way.” An amazing photograph exists showing Watkins as a bearded elderly man with a cane, suit, and top hat on the streets of San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, a massive cloud of smoke visible in the background.

River View, Cathedral Rock, Yosemite [CEW 31], 1861; Carleton E. Watkins photograph collection, PC-RM-Watkins; Box 1, Folder 5; California Historical Society

  Much of Watkins’ studio was lost, including the massive mammoth glass plates used to create his famous photographs of the Yosemite Valley and other parts of the West as it was being settled. Complicating the issue is the fact that, due to poor financial decisions earlier in his career, Watkins had lost many of his original negatives to a group of creditors which required him to reshoot many of his original photographs (his “New Series” is the result of this). Watkins’ photographs are dispersed widely and held by numerous archives and private collectors around the country. Chief among these are the Bancroft Library, the Society of California Pioneers, and the California Historical Society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Muybridge did manage to eventually transfer his archive to Stanford. In fact, Leland Stanford – a railroad baron – was Muybridge’s greatest champion and supporter, much as Collis Huntington was Watkins’. Some have suggested that this matter of the photographers’ archives is the reason that Muybridge is better known today.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, also compares the two men. she writes, “In the 1860s and 1870s, landscape was a western business, but Watkins came first, and he stood alone.” Over the years, his subjects varied from mining camps to railroads and Spanish missions up and down the California coast. Watkins photographed famous artists, writers, and professors, native plants of California and the Southwest, and the newly built Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City – a great dome that looks like it recently descended from space.

Watkins’s gorgeous nature photographs still stun viewers and his style is almost instantly recognizable from his beautifully composed photographs with a certain discernable focus and clarity. This is even more amazing given the incredibly labor intensive process that created them and involved a team of mules, giant glass plates, and a travelling “dark room” in a covered wagon. Still, Solnit writes: “They are radiant with a mysterious serenity.”

Nevada Fall, Yosemite [CEW 90], 1861; Carleton E. Watkins photograph collection, PC-RM-Watkins; Box 3, Folder 6; California Historical Society.  

The California Historical Society is making the entirety of its Watkins collection available for the first time, and its contents are revealed in a detailed finding aid. More selections will also soon be available on the CHS digital library. This work was made possible by Teaching California – a statewide initiative developed to bring primary sources into California’s classrooms. There are also a number of Watkins photographs (including a panorama of San Francisco) currently on view in our galleries as a part of the Boomtowns exhibition.

Bibliography:

Green, Tyler. Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.

Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking, 2003.

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Written by Erin Hurley, Teaching California Project Archivist at California Historical Society