[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hello folks, and welcome back to another episode of The American Attic, where we deliver dialogue driven explorations of California history and beyond.
Presented by the Sacramento Historical Society and hosted by Eric Sweigert. Join us as we uncover topics that inspire imagination, inform action, and enrich the presentation. How is history preserved when we go into a museum or visit an archive and we see those exhibits? What goes into those exhibits? What goes into taking what was at one point an aspect of our present world and preserving it for future generations?
[00:00:57] Speaker B: What does the role of a city.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Historian have in that process? And where are some of the places or who are some of the people that one meets who has a career working with the past and working in history? In this episode of The American Attic, we dive into these questions and a whole lot more as we talk to the official city historian for Sacramento. Before this role, our guest was a curator at the Oakland Museum of California and shares with us her unique perspective of the past as informed by her over 30 years of experience working in this space.
Our guest also leads preservation efforts at the center for Sacramento History, one of the oldest collection of California artifacts in this state.
So join us, folks, for one more trip up to The American Attic with our guest today, none other than city historian for Sacramento, Marcia Iman.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Well again. Marcia Eyman. Thank you for joining us today on The American Attic, the Sacramento Historical Society's podcast. Thank you for taking the time today. And I feel like just a good place that we can start today's discussion is just to look at your current role that you're at right now. And for those listeners that aren't familiar with what it means to be a city historian, could you maybe walk us through that a little?
[00:02:28] Speaker C: I mean, I will say other state, like the state of New York, they have city historians for almost every city in the as it's not in California. I don't know of another city historian, but Boise, Idaho, because I was friends with her, she was the city historian, but they all have different jobs. But in this case I'm the City and county for the City and county of Sacramento. And what it means is managing the City's and county's historic assets which include all of the government records, but also private collections and corporate records, artifacts, film, photographs and making them accessible to the public, but also utilizing them and to continue to collect to tell the broad story of the City and county of Sacramento.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Got it. And did I hear that correctly? You said not every city gets a city historian or it's kind of hit or miss sometimes.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: It's interesting because with all the protests that went around after the death of George Floyd, there was this movement to look at what kind of statues, know what is our civic image. And Los Angeles went through this huge process, a huge civic memory project, and at the end there were like all these things of what the city needed. And one of the top thing was we need a city historian. And I thought that was great because there's no one there that's looking at these historic assets that's in any way trying to hold or to tell the story of the city of Los Angeles because it's compartmentalized between university professors, the city library and things like that. But it's very unusual in actually Sacramento that all of these records are housed in one place and that they're made accessible through the center because it is a state law that the city and county has to provide public access to these materials.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And as the city historian, like you just mentioned, you're involved in a lot of initiatives or whatever we would want to call them. But what's your unique relationship with the center for Sacramento History in particular? Because I know in Sacramento and I know through my involvement with the historical society, we have a historical society, we have a history alliance, we have a center for Sacramento History, and then we have a history museum too. So is there an easy way to kind of distill the relationship between these groups and stakeholders?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: The difference between all of those except for the center is we're the only one that collects. Nobody else collects. The historic society doesn't collect. Nobody does. Except for the center for Sacramento history.
And actually this Sacramento History Museum, the building is owned by the city and the artifacts are owned by the city. And it was a contractual relationship for them to operate the museum in some way, shape or form of which it's still being determined what that relationship will be in the future. But those are all city collections.
But the difference is that we are the collecting agency, we are the research facility. We are the place that you come to if you want to get access to those materials.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Got it.
So this Sacramento History Museum, they get their artifacts from you then, I'd imagine. Okay, got it.
Yeah. Thank you. I was just curious about that. I'm a newcomer to Sacramento a little bit, just been here for three or four years. So it's still figuring out the landscape, confusing thing.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: And it's something that the city is looking at that that's really bizarre situation.
And so it's something that I think it's an evolving thing.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Sure, yeah.
And something that I was curious because I have a background in history. I got my degree from Davis, and obviously one of the first questions I get from family and friends is, great, what are you going to do with a history degree? I'm sure you face those questions in your life as well.
Now that you're in this role now where you're weekly involved in preservation and historical related topics, is there something that you do that you look forward to the most with your work? I imagine it's a lot like most people's jobs. There are things they enjoy doing more than others. Anything come to mind?
[00:07:03] Speaker C: Well, I'm a city employee, so there are obligations of things that I have to do as a city employee, like manage budgets and payroll and all of those things. But the great thing about my job is working with the collection and the opportunity to learn every single day.
And actually we have a really great team here of three archivists and two collections staff, 3D staff that just are very passionate about the work they do. And as they are working with collections, they share that with me. And also when I get to do research and have projects, like, I have things that are just my projects because I'm the liaison with the cemetery. I also do historic content for Old Sacramento. I work with preservation, so I'm the link between these different departments, which is I enjoy working with all of them and that's a really wonderful experience. But it's when the film series that that's my baby and I work with a set of scholars that review the materials that we produce and make comments. But the research and that is the best part. I mean, I think that's a lot of why a lot of us become historians is what we learn when we do the research, that it's like doors open all the time and we find new things and that's the best part. And yeah, I had a lot of my aunt used to say, why do you want to be around all that old stuff?
Which is not an uncommon question.
But the thing is, I don't think a lot of people realize the diversity of things that you can do with a history degree. Most people think you're going to teach and that's kind of the most. But you can become involved in preservation. There's archives work, there's public historians, but there's a lot of work in museums as well.
But there are independent companies that hire historians just to do research and I know quite a few people that do that kind of work. And now consulting is becoming a big deal because less and less they want full time employees so you can actually be a full time consultant and make a pretty good living.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and something that I was curious about too, in preparation for this discussion was so that's kind of a snapshot of what you're doing now and some of the things you're involved and how did you get to this position here? I imagine there's certifications, you got to have your degree and all this stuff. But was history something that you had a natural leaning towards growing up and heading in that direction?
[00:09:36] Speaker C: Well, I used to joke with my when I grew up on a farm and I found out that my great uncle who owned the farm before us had buried his garbage in the back. So I excavated it and I found glass milk bottles from the dairy that didn't no longer existed and all of these different medicine bottles and stuff like that. So in my own way, I guess as a kid I was interested in it. But my best friend in high school, her mother was my high school history teacher and I was fortunate enough to travel with them on a number of occasions, which was a wonderful experience because I saw the world through a history teacher's eyes, which was a great thing. And when I went into college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to be, but I took a trip with them to Colonial Williamsburg and I came back and I said, I want to work in a museum.
But I wasn't sure if I wanted to do art or history. So I have dual degrees in art and art history and then went on to do my graduate work in history just because I shouldn't say that's probably publicly. But I didn't want to work in an art museum and it was the right decision for me. There's something working in a history museums is extremely gratifying and it can be really difficult, but it's very gratifying work. Whenever you work with the public, you're never going to please everybody.
But the people that I've gotten to meet and that have told me their stories and shared things with me, I am blown away with the way I was welcomed. And one of the last things I did when I was at the Oakland Museum is I did an exhibit on California and the Vietnam War. And through that, I interviewed mong families. I went into their home, they took out all their things and they showed me all of this and they told me their stories. I met with Cambodian people who were refugees at the time and they sat and told me their stories. I talked to Vietnamese who had been boat people or people who came in. I mean, just the whole range of things. I mean, one woman, she was Hmong and she didn't know me from Adam. I went down and told her what I was doing and she told me this story about carrying her wedding dress on her back as she crossed the rivers to get out and how she'd held it up so it would stay dry. And she lent it to us to pee on display. And I'm just like, oh, my God, that's a priceless thing for her. And she let me take that. And that was always like I'll never forget that or the gentleman that had been imprisoned after. If you had worked for the American government and stayed behind and served, you were put into prison when North Vietnam took over. And he sat with me and told me so many of them told me what had happened to, you know, these are Californians now and wanted to incorporate their stories. But I went out in the fields and picked strawberries with another group of Mong residents.
You have an opportunity to work with living history in a different way when you're doing those kinds of things, and it's extremely rewarding and fulfilling. And for me, it's about getting their stories out. I mean, for that project, I really wanted to go not just how Americans what happened to the Americans, but what happened to all these new Americans that had come to California because of the war. And that was a totally different experience and a totally different exhibit than what we had first envisioned. But it was, I think, better for that.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And you said that was at the Oakland Museum. Wow.
There are a lot of departure points I was keeping a mental track of when you were speaking of some of the directions we could go from that.
So you did your own archaeological dig growing up. You did your own archaeological always a nerd.
[00:13:38] Speaker C: My staff, we always joke that we're just a bunch of but, yes, I did.
I still have some of those bottles, but I wanted to see what was in somebody else's trash, and I was curious about it, which was a good little adventure for me.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Well, and that's the curiosity aspect. And I feel like something that came to mind when you were speaking was that I used to teach history in Napa. I was at a school over there in Encounter. When you're trying to get high schoolers excited about history, you encounter a little bit of friction, a little bit of resistance. But what I've noticed, and it just kind of mirrored what you were describing there a little bit, was that everyone's interested in their own personal history. And so you might encounter a person who's like, I don't like history at all as a subject, no interest. And then you get them talking about how their family came to California or something like that, and you'll see them get really animated. And in my mind, that's almost like a little gateway.
[00:14:45] Speaker C: So many people go, well, history is boring. History is stagnant. And I was you know, the thing is that with so many kids, I think is that the way we teach history is that history is something that happened over there. And for us and what we do, and particularly with our films, the premise for those are that history all history is local and no matter what, and even you look at major events and I'll use the Vietnam War as an example, everybody was touched by that in some way, but in different ways. And so as I interviewed different people, they had slightly different experiences, but they all were impacted by it. So to think that that only happened over there is a mistake. And so what I believe is that we have to teach people that history happens here. And you're, as much a part of it, and you're impacted by it, and it's not something that's just in the past or over there.
There's a quote that I love, and I had it in my slide presentation. But history is a way for us to chart the future because we need to have that constant dialogue with the past in order to help guide us in the future.
It is essential because they always say, well, we keep repeating the same mistakes, but we also go down the same path and not learn from what happened before. And it's not that we're making mistakes, it's that we're wasting time. And we could be saying, okay, here's a precedent, and this is what professors are saying, okay, this is what happened here. And this was the ramification of it. I mean, I was a consultant for a period of time up in Marin County to help them with their history. And one of the things I did was write, like, a history quote that went into the newspaper there. And my favorite one was about San Quentin Prison because it's always like, why would they put San Quentin in Marin? It's this affluent place and so forth. And it's like it was there because it was far away from San Francisco, which was the core during the Gold Rush, and that was considered far away. You had to get on a boat. It would be hard for the prisoners to get back to the city where the people were and so forth. But as that area grew, it's now in probably the most expensive real estate in Northern California, and nobody wants it there anymore. But it's got walls that are 8ft thick, and it ain't going anywhere, but those are drew gilpin faust wrote that history is a series of choices, and I think we are looking at decisions and choices that people made in the past that lead to us, to where we are today. And we have to just like we're making decisions and choices now.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
Sorry. Who was that author you mentioned?
[00:17:41] Speaker C: Drew Gilphin. Faust. She was the first woman to be she was the first head of Harvard's History Department and president of Harvard. First president of Harvard. She wrote about two of my favorite books called Mothers of Invention, which is about Southern women during the Vietnam, during the Civil War. And then she also wrote a book called The Republic of Suffering, which is about death and dying during that period and kind of is a really good she's one of my favorite historians, and she's really accessible to read. And her books are powerful.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: And that can be rare, too, when you have somebody with very dense subject matter knowledge who are also very easy to read. That's a nice she is easy to read.
[00:18:25] Speaker C: And her books were best sellers. I would recommend them to anybody.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Awesome.
Thank you. Well, you mentioned something earlier that I wanted to make sure we touched upon before going back to the center and kind of the contemporary activity and projects that you're working on. But you mentioned a trip to Williamsburg and you also mentioned picking strawberries with some folks that you met through your history work.
Are there any other kind of unique places or locations? Because I know sometimes all it takes is a trip. You can travel 6000 miles, you can travel 600 miles and there's history all around us. You just kind of sometimes got to travel to see it. Any other unique places your history work has taken you to?
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Well, there's a number of different places. How many do you want?
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Maybe the abbreviated version or the top three or something like that.
[00:19:27] Speaker C: Well, one of the coolest things that I got to do of meeting somebody who was historically significant was Peter Stackpole, who is one of the original Life magazine photographers. And he lived in the Bay Area and we were working on an exhibit of his work. And I went up to his house, which was in the Oakland Hills, and he worked with me and I at his copy stand and made copies of his photographs that we used to lay out the exhibit. But I got to spend time with him and he was just the most amazing, kind man you can imagine. He unfortunately lost his home in the Oakland Hills fire shortly after that and didn't live too many years afterwards, but just a great guy. But here locally, and I can't think of the name of the town but where the Hop riots took place and in the early 19 hundreds. What's the name of the town? Someone out of my head. But there was the man who died. They took him to the main house and I got to go to that house and they said, this is the room that they laid him in and he died here. And so that was the story I'd heard about since I had been in California. But to go through that house and see that and then also all the buildings that went with that, they had a huge room that was just to feed all the workers that worked in the Hop Yards and then how they processed them, the buildings that were I mean, that's an amazing thing. And then the last one would be just a few years ago when the Sacramento Bee building was shut down for operation and going in there and seeing what it had been and that it was all shutting down. I mean, there was a credit union in there. They had a doctor and nurse full time in there. They had a library, they had a gym. I mean, there was a photo studio, there was a test kitchen. I mean, there was a restaurant, a cafeteria there for the employees and it went down to nothing.
You could go through the building and trace how it had grown and it was three or four stories of printing presses that they were tearing out while we were there. And it's staggering. I mean, to see what's happened to the published newspaper industry and kind of understanding the very we house the Sacramento Bee photo Morgue. Here we have all the bound volumes of the Bee and to look at kind of how they have been a watchdog for this community and is that role going to continue and seeing? And for one of the films we did was on the KKK and the B. Those were the reporters on the ground going out, really investigating that.
And they published people's license plates of who were at those meetings. They were really just on the cutting edge of reporting. Is that happening now? And if it's not, then what have we lost?
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And who or what might be hopefully filling that space of just documentation. Wow.
You mentioned the I'm not familiar with the Hopyard riots. Was that something I know California saw some tumultuous times during the kind of the unionization movement. Was that related to workers unions and what was happening there?
[00:22:57] Speaker C: Let me see if I mean, it's something that when I worked at Oakland, we talked about the Hop riots. Now, here in the Sacramento area and particularly over by Sac State, there were a lot of hop farms, and it was big business. And they started growing hops here and beer, which is coming back full scale, but that started in the 19th century. Let me see if I can find it here.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: If we can't find it, no worries. I don't want to make you go down the rabbit hole too far.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: No, but I should remember it because I was there. But I'm trying to it is a big deal because it was such a violent thing that it generally gets yeah.
So it was a big deal at the time.
And that it ended in violence was a big part of that.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And to be able to go to the location that had happened or adjacent events happened in my historical background, that's what got me most excited about history, was visiting the places, seeing the homes.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: Okay, here it is. It's the wheatland riot.
And it took place in 1913.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: 1913. Okay.
[00:24:16] Speaker C: Poor working conditions because of migratory laborers that pushed that forward.
13 wheatland. So I was in Wheatland, and they were the people who owned the Heartmp farms.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: Got it. Well, thank you. That gives me another departure point for exploring California history.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: Yeah. That part is really the labor history, particularly related to migrant workers is pretty intense. But that was 1913.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Got it. Yeah. Okay. The only glimpse I got of that the migrant worker experience was just through some of Steinbeck's essays because I know John Steinbeck documented a ton of that. But that was a little bit later. I think probably like 1940s, maybe, or.
[00:25:02] Speaker C: Should read Kathy Olmstudd's book.
And it's really good. And I'm trying to remember the name of it. I think it's on my shelf back there. But actually, if you go to our website, we did an exhibit on the 1934 conspiracy trials that took place here in Sacramento where they went in and raided the Communist headquarters. And at that time, the Communists were organizing the workers, and they raided it here in town. We have all the photographs from the trial and from the raids, and we asked her to come in and talk about it, and she became so involved with the research that she produced a book later, which I would highly recommend. It's really good, and you can look at her talk. You can watch her talk on our website as well as part of our speaker series.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Kathy Olmstead. I'll remember that. Thank you.
[00:25:57] Speaker C: Davis oh, great.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Okay. Go. Aggies well, thank you. And kind of changing tact here for a second and looking at what the center is doing these days.
A lot of our listeners, they love history, they appreciate it, but they're not quite sure what the day to day, week to week of historical preservation looks like. And some of the activities you're doing at the center.
I had the opportunity, I believe it was maybe a few months ago. I used to work at the advertising agency runyon Saltzman here in town. And you guys hosted us. You guys hosted us. We came by and explored the location and the site.
[00:26:37] Speaker C: You look familiar. I was like, I must have met you.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: No, I was part of that group. Just looking at Jean Runyon and her position in the tapestry of know if for visitors that are going there today and for visitors that maybe haven't been there before.
What does it look like at the center, and what are you guys working on right now?
[00:27:00] Speaker C: So, actually our big event was this last weekend, which we partner with the state archives, the state library, and the city library to do archives crawl. And we do that the first weekend in October, 1 Saturday in October. And it's basically a crawl. It's free. And with that, we do vault tours. All of the institutions do that. We also host smaller organizations that have archives at our facility, and they're at all four locations. So there's a lot of smaller organizations that come. Like, we had the Delta Historical Society, yolo County, Placer County, and we had the Automobile Museum's. Archival, folks. But that's the rare time that people get to go in the vault, because otherwise, if you come here, all you really see is our front room and research. But we don't, because somebody asked us on one of the tours on Saturday. They go, can we just come back and stroll through here? And we went, no, absolutely not.
Because there are so many little things that could just disappear, and we just can't do that because an archive isn't a library and a museum collection. We lend to other institutions, but we have very strict security things in our collection policy because we lent just recently, and we just got it back down to La.
The La county Museum did an exhibit on reparations, and they borrowed some materials that we had from a case that took place in 1864 with Daniel Blue and what is believed to be the last slave case in California. And so we have the probate records, the habeas corpus that was filed as part of that, that would free a young twelve year old girl from slavery that's after the Emancipation Proclamation. So those kind of things that we try to get out there, but we lend those out under very strict criteria for display and security reasons for climate, but security and just so that they're not lost for the rest.
So, yeah, it's different than your public library. You have to schedule an appointment. You usually would do an interview with the archivist. I don't do research appointments. My archivists handle all that, or the curator does. If they want three dimensional materials and then they schedule an appointment, you come to our reading room and look at the material and do your research here.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: Got it? Okay. So for the average history enthusiast that just wants to learn more, maybe point them in the direction of the history museum instead.
[00:29:40] Speaker C: No, I wouldn't say that. I would go to online.
There are so many resources available online of what you can look.
You know, we have a huge presence on YouTube. Our films, we have multiple films that are out there. You can go to archive.org and you can look up our Mugbooks, and you can literally turn the pages that date from the Gold Rush era up to the 1950s. And so the assessor books are also accessible in that way. It's just a matter of figuring what do you want to look at those kind of things.
If you really want an in depth if you want to see that, go online right now until we have a better exhibition area so we can get more materials out on display.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Yeah, and that brought something. I was in preparation for this call. I was doing a little bit of research on the center, and I know in recent years, you guys and this could still be happening, but you guys have been doing a digitization process of a lot of artifacts. Everything was print back in the day, and so that's a big lift. I imagine that a lot of archives and preservationists are having to go through. Where are you guys in that project? Is it halfway through?
Or has this all already happened and I'm completely off the mark?
[00:31:01] Speaker C: Oh, no, this will take years. Digitizing for the next 50 years, probably just because of the depth of material that we have. I mean, we digitize constantly. And I have two people out there right now that all they're doing is no, there's three. Or four here, that's all they're doing is scanning and digitizing. But it's so much material. And we have a huge film collection, and that is laborious to do that. But we have gotten a series of grants in order to digitize those materials, but we are constantly doing that.
And then as we're bringing in new collections, that's even more so. It's a never ending process. I don't see everybody thinks, oh, well, you can go get all that done. If you were to come here and look at the volumes of government records that we have, that's one thing. But then the other reality is you've got a generation now that can't read cursive. And so the majority of government records through up until the 1920s probably are written by hand in cursive. So if you're going to research those records, if they're not transcribed in some way, they're inaccessible to you. Wow, just another thing. But we can digitize them. But there's a generation that's coming up that doesn't know how to read cursive.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: That had never occurred to me.
[00:32:26] Speaker C: My daughter can't read cursive, and she's 23 years old. Yeah, but they don't teach it in school anymore. They can tell you a lot about a computer, but they can't that. But it's a very laborious process. You're dealing with fragile materials, so you can't zip through it really fast. And oftentimes with our probate records, they have been folded. They're this big, and they get folded like this, and then they get folded into themselves. So that's a whole process where we have to humidify them to flatten them out even in order to digitize them. And that whole humidification process can take weeks. And we do that in order to preserve them, because they're better flat than stored. Otherwise if they're stored for a long term, I'll hold it up like that, they start to break down at the folds, and then you're going to have pieces of documents instead of a solid piece. So there's always, like in everything we do it's to digitize, but it's also to preserve and conserve as we go through everything. The same thing with our film collection, we needed to get cold storage. And so that now is in a cold storage vault that's between 38 and 42 degrees at all times in order to add another 150 years to the life of those pieces.
One of the things nobody thinks about, which I always like to bring up, is I know how long a black and white photograph will last. I know how long paper will last under conditions and film, but nobody knows how long digital will last. Yeah, nobody knows.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: One of those big mysteries.
How long have you been with the center of Sacramento history as the city historian? If I want to remember, was it 1510 or 15 years?
[00:34:08] Speaker C: More or less 15 years. It'll be 16 in January.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: Okay. So that's kind of ample time to get a feel for kind of the various work and projects and areas that you're contributing on. Something I was curious about, the Pandemic threw a wrench in so many industries, so many areas in the private sector and public sector.
How did the Pandemic kind of impact the operations of the center?
[00:34:37] Speaker C: Well, it heavily impacted us. We couldn't let researchers in. And I will say, though, we did our best to if people wrote us requests and we did our best to research and provide them with the information that we could. There were certain people that because of COVID we couldn't let them come in. And we had a waiting list of people that wanted to come in as soon as that was lifted. But we were one of the few people that we got permission to come in. But it was only one day a week, and so we couldn't be here with more than one or two people here at a time.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:35:12] Speaker C: And so we would break that up of who came in what day, because you really need to be able to work with the collections. And that was what our days were, to come in and work with the collection. And fortunately, we had a number of things. We had a good chunk online that we could continue to work with.
Some of us came in two days a week. Some of us came in three days a week. Now there's somebody here. We are more back to work than any other division of the city. There's somebody here five days a week. Most days there's maybe even seven to eight. All of us are here at the same time.
But you need to work with the collection in order to move forward. Yeah, it hurt us. We got behind, but we work to catch up every day.
[00:36:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
I'm just thinking the work that I know you guys do, it definitely seems like something that you can't really do. Remote. You need to be around the artifacts that you're going to be preserving in some way, shape or form.
[00:36:14] Speaker C: I would think there are things like for me, working from home, some days it's better because I can actually write and there are people coming into my office all the time. So that works well.
And it is nice to be able to or if I have meetings on Zoom meetings all day, I'll stay because why drive all the way in to sit at my office with the door closed when I could do it from home for sure. I've had those days where it's just easier to stay home.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of people have been experiencing something like that the last few years.
I know you mentioned I think we got a few more minutes left and just a couple of questions that I wanted to check in with you on.
Is it the archives crawl? Did I get that detail right? Archives crawl? And did you say that's an only October event or that's one once a.
[00:37:09] Speaker C: Year, the first Saturday in October.
[00:37:11] Speaker B: Got it. Okay, thank you. Just wanted to flag that for folks that want to get involved leading into the holidays that we've got rapidly approaching any events or anything you guys have planned going on that the public would be or could be involved in.
[00:37:28] Speaker C: We do have our next event, which is part of our speaker series. We have Evelyn McDonough, who she just published a new book on. Joan Didion and she did her research here at the center. She'll be here October 19. The tickets are available online through the center. They're $10 each, but that's limited to 75 people. That's all we can accommodate here. But we will be selling the books and she will be signing afterwards.
And actually, there'll be some people here that grew up with Joan that she interviewed as part of her book as well.
And then October 21, we partner with Soul Collective to do Day of the Dead in Old Sacramento. And that starts at 03:00 on the 21st and goes till 09:00 at night. It's a really great event.
The history of Day of the Dead here in Sacramento is so rich, and particularly in the 60s with the Royal Chicano Air Force who did so much to revitalize it here.
It's just a really rich heritage that I'm very happy to work with Soul Collective to have this event. And this is the first year full force back on the 1849 scene in Old Sack. And there's going to be over 20 vendors there. And there's live music and dance performances.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:38:49] Speaker C: Dancers. It's really great. And many altars and things that are part of it.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: That's awesome. And we'll add links to when this show goes live, we'll add links to where folks can get tickets and learn more about the event and things like that. So that sounds awesome.
[00:39:04] Speaker C: Yeah. Day of the Day is free. So just come down.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Oh, just come down. All right. That's great. Awesome. Well, and I've lived on both coasts at one point in my life. And Sacramento has such, in my mind, a well preserved historic district. Like, it's so cool to come to a city the size of Sacramento and encounter a space that if you squint your eyes just a little bit, you could be in the 19th century or something like that.
[00:39:32] Speaker C: Oh, no, it's true.
Sacramento is very unique in what has been preserved over time. I mean, you go to someplace like San Francisco, it's kind of spread out in a way. But Sacramento and also because you have sutter sport here, you have Old Sacramento. And the Old City Cemetery is such an amazing place to tell the story. And we are constantly working on more interpretive signage and different cell phone tours and things like that so people can understand the depth of who came here. It really is a document about the California gold rush. That whole cemetery is and the diversity of this state.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Yeah, something that popped into my head when I was doing some research was I know that the San Francisco earthquake, 1906, was devastating in a lot of different ways.
Am I correct in hearing that the Sacramento archive is the kind of oldest active archive in the state? Or maybe I might be miss saying that, but is there something like that?
There was something that was in San Francisco, and it's been but it was destroyed. So Sacramento is the place to be, right?
[00:40:45] Speaker C: In 1906, City Hall collapsed and burned, and a large portion of the city records were destroyed. That's where all the paper suns came from. The Chinese were able to say, oh, my record was destroyed in the six earthquake. I really am a resident. And they actually worked in that sense. But I think we have the most complete set of records from the city that are together of the city of any city here in California. And they're the oldest because they go back to 1848, which is when California and statehood is 1850. But we document it from the beginning, and our assessor books list Sam Brannon and all of those other people and sutter and who owned what. And they're really these amazing documents. But also as you start to mine them more, you see that one of the things I pointed out is women owned property, but they only listed their initials, so nobody knew it was a woman that owned the property until we did a little research and the same thing. African Americans were property owners, but they oftentimes were not their full name. So you didn't know who they were, and it didn't say, this is a black man. Or you can start to see kind of how diverse this community was in the beginning because people live like Daniel Blue, an African American man who came here in 1849, literally lived across the street from Peter Burnett, our first governor. And Peter Burnett was a huge racist and obviously didn't like a black man living across the street from him or anywhere near his property. But according to family folklore, is that Daniel really enjoyed coming out of his house and letting Peter for not know that he was there for him.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, just kind of as we wrap up this discussion, something I did want to ask is kind of taking a step back from the day to day work you're doing and kind of the larger trends and patterns in historical preservation, especially in Sacramento. And, you know, are there any opportunities that are kind of on the horizon that the center is considering? Are there any threats that you feel that would impact the mission and the work that you guys are doing there at the center? Any kind of bigger trends that you're noticing and either excited about or concerned about?
[00:43:11] Speaker C: Well, the number one thing we worry about is our location because we're right next to the levee in an area that was the natural drainage for flooding. And it's been well documented that Sacramento is the most likely city to flood next to New Orleans. And we are well past overdue for a major flood in this area last year. I think we got a little taste of what a lot of precipitation is like, but we'd been dry for a long time this year, if we get that amount of rain or more, we will hit ground saturation, and that will be critical for us.
And we need a new home. We need to be someplace that we're more visible than in a natural drainage area next door to the levee. And so that's a huge issue for us. Of which part? You know, I'm trying to get out there and talk to the public and let them know that this is something that their community should be proud of, that they have. Not many cities have these historical resources available to them for free. There's no charge to come here, and we don't charge for copies, even if they want copies of documents. So this is your treasure.
And we work every day to continue to collect, to document all of the people that are here and the businesses and all of those things. So it's an ongoing process as we continue to document. I like to joke with upper management. It's like, well, what history do you want me to leave out at this point? Do you want me to leave out what happened here during COVID Is that okay? Because I'm running out of room. Yeah, we have to think about those things.
Do we want to start thinking of whose story is not important enough to collect?
[00:45:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
So the effort to identify a new home for the center with sufficient space, has sufficient facilities to house everything, in your estimation, is progress happening, in your estimation, in terms of locating, getting folks involved, getting folks aware? Where in kind of the process would you say that we're at right now?
[00:45:26] Speaker C: Well, where we're at is really trying to get that broader awareness that we need to know and trying to recognize that we need a place, a more centralized place for us to display our collections and to tell those stories, because there's potential. When I was giving the talk at the Historical Society afterwards, a gentleman, because it was brought up that I had created an exhibit that went to the Smithsonian, and he said, well, why don't you do that here? And I said, Well, I don't really have a large enough exhibit space to create something of that size. And also, I've never had a budget to do that. The exhibit that I did, which was silver and gold case images of the California Gold Rush that went to the Smithsonian, that I had a budget of $225,000.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: And I don't have that kind of money here, but that's what it takes. And that was in 1998. So there's an inflated cost to today. But I think does Sacramento want something like that? Do they want to have that kind of recognition? Because these collections deserve that visibility. I just don't have a place to do it that's on a large enough scale. Or I as a city employee, I can apply for grants, but I can't raise any money.
It's considered a conflict of interest. And so how do I get that much money to create something onto that scale? We have the materials that could do that. Well, we housed the tower records collection.
That would be a great exhibit, that could be super fun, that could travel and really talk about an industry. That's the record industry that's changed and evolved, but also the fact that towers started here in Sacramento and became an international and I think that we've talked, reached out to the rock and roll hall of fame, they're very interested. But it's that how do we raise the money, how do we make this happen? Kind of thing. And very small staff, all these things.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: As far as I can tell, it starts with awareness. So I hope this episode does a little bit, little modest amount to move the needle or maybe more than that. But yeah, it's awesome to see what you guys are doing. And Marsha, I appreciate you taking the time today to connect and talk about the important work you guys are doing.
Any for listeners that want to learn more about the center, want to learn more about the work you guys are doing, where can they go to either encounter content that you guys are putting together or just learn more about the center?
[00:48:06] Speaker C: You can go to our website, that's one place to start. You can also search we have a pretty large presence on YouTube with a lot of the original productions that come out of here. Or you can go to archive.org and a lot of our film footage, which we house the Kcara and KOVR, as well as private film collections here, which are phenomenal. And if you go to archive.org, you can search pretty much any topic and find a film that's from us so that you understand the treasure trove that's here, but also the online archive of California. You can search our collections and archival we have finding AIDS available on that, but we actually are used heavily. But unfortunately, the sad thing is collections don't get as much attention as big art museums do, but they're just as important and just as irreplaceable and just as valuable.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think that is a great place to wrap up Marcia. So thank you again for your time. This was awesome. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I love talking history whenever.
[00:49:08] Speaker C: No, no, it was great. Thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: Awesome.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: Of the Sacramento historical society's, the American attic, if you'd like to learn more about the society and upcoming speaker series, please visit sachistoricalsociety.org. If you have ideas for topics and speakers we can engage, drop us a line at
[email protected]. See you next time.
