Ventura Then & Now | Inside the Museum of Ventura County Archives

We generally aren't the first people to go through something and we can look at how people went through something in the past and we can get hope from it and we can get experience from it and we can use it in our daily lives to help us make decisions and help us maybe make better decisions than were made in the past. My name is Dea Tarafranca and we are at the Museum of Ventura County. The Museum of Ventura County has been in existence since 1913. Although the actual collection that started the museum is much older than that. The collection originally belonged to a doctor named Cephas Bard who moved here after the Civil War and started taking items in trade for services. So if he pulled a tooth for you, you might give him a Chumash basket. Some of the items in our collection are from the 1500s and we want them to last for another 500 years. The Museum of Ventura County houses about 45,000 photographic positives and then we have about 200,000 photographic negatives. Of those we have over 7,000 digitized but we also have documents that have been digitized. Indexes, oral history transcripts and then we also have videos and oral history audio that we've digitized as well. The photograph that I think represents the spirit of Ventura is a photograph of James Crothers and the photograph is him in a buggy that's being pulled by a horse and it is in front of a gas station. And when cars came to Ventura County, James Crothers really didn't like them and was really upset when people would drive too fast past his house. I think one of the things that happens in Ventura is this tension between the past and the future. Do we build? Do we not build? Do we change? Do we not change? I think that photograph really distills the essence of that tension between growth and change and what we know and what we're comfortable with. Generally we open a new large exhibit in the main galleries in June. We have the Wachtell Gallery, Wachtell Family Gallery. We display items from the permanent collection in that gallery and that changes two to three times a year and then we have the Smith Gallery where the George Stuart historical figures are on display and that changes three times a year. It doesn't matter if you're from Ventura County or from somewhere else. There's a story there that's universal. We use local artifacts and local stories to make that universal story come alive. So the museum actually has almost 30,000 objects. We have probably over 500,000 items if not more than that up in the library and archives. Generally speaking when we have an exhibition we often have less than 100 things that go on exhibit so there are innumerable things that don't go on exhibit. But one of the things that we think about when we're putting together our exhibits are the objects in our collection and what stories they can tell so that we can get them out and people can actually get to see them. There are so many stories from Ventura's past that I think more people should know about. I think one thing that people don't know is that the parking structure at the end of California Street is not the first structure actually to be there. In the late teens early 1920s there was actually a bathhouse on that site and it had not just a pool it had a skating rink, it had a ballroom, a movie theater, a salon, it had a patio up on the top for viewing, it had over 400 changing rooms. It was a huge complex and a huge draw to the end of California Street. The archive is rich in basically the 1870s through the 1940s. I would say those are our richest areas. We have an incredible amount of information on prohibition in Ventura County as well as the oil boom that took place around the same time. Brewster photographs are very very popular. People use the photographs of the mission of downtown Ventura. We also have photographs of the pier, Main Street. I would say generally speaking those are the most requested items. The research library is free and open to the public. We do ask that folks make a reservation online so they can make an appointment through our website just because we have a small reading room and we want to make sure that we have enough space for folks to come in and do their research. We do have photographs of the pier through time. Originally it was called the wharf and it was built actually before there were railroads and before there were actually really good roads coming into Ventura. It was one of the few ways to get things like lumber and supplies that we needed to build the city that we know today. I'm going to actually show you a photograph today of a 1936 fire on the pier. On my very first day in the archive I came across negatives of Johnny Cash. I had driven through Casita Springs and knew that he had come here and used to hang out in Ventura. But the Ventura County Star took some photographs of him and we have those photographs in our collection. The most exciting thing for me in looking at all of the archives actually isn't a date or a period or an event. It's actually the stories of the people who lived here. The human stories. It could be the story of Lucy Hicks. It could be the story of Theodosia Burr Shepherd who actually had one of the earliest seed companies in the state of California, maybe in the country. It's the human emotion of why people came here, why they stayed here, and what they built here that is the most interesting to me. To really experience the history of Ventura, a walking tour of the downtown is an absolute must. Going and seeing the pier yourself, walking up to the cross, walking through the mission and the garden there, the botanical gardens, you get to see all of the city. And I think walking around, seeing the fig tree by the post office, going into the post office and seeing the mural that was painted during the Depression. Every time I walk past Finney's Craft House, I think about the fact that Earl Stanley Gardner worked in that building and wrote some of his books in Ventura. We actually have a photograph in our collection. So the courthouse was completed in 1913. It was much grander and more beautiful than pretty much any other building in the city. If you walk past it, it has this sort of majesty to it. It really is a beautiful building with giant doors. And I don't think people pay attention to the doors. Look at the doors the next time you go past the city hall. One of the most surprising photographs that I have come across in the collection is just a year after the courthouse opened, there was a ton of rain and there was actually a flood. And we have photographs of boulders. If you're looking at the courthouse and you look to the right, where the road, sort of the drive goes up behind the courthouse, all of that is full of dirt and boulders. And I think it's an interesting juxtaposition of this grand, very solid building and then nature sort of saying, hey, wait a minute. Human stories often repeat themselves. One of the stories that one of our volunteers researched in 2020 was the 1918 flu pandemic, the Spanish flu. It was a global pandemic. He wrote the blog about, you know, in 1919, people arguing about whether or not to mask, how people responded. And what we heard from people who read that blog was that it was actually comforting to know that they were not the first people to go through something like that. The history in Ventura goes back at least 10,000 years. So archaeologically, we're really interesting. I think that in terms of settling this place, Ventura has an amazing climate for agriculture. But also in present day, we have a great business community and we have amazing natural resources. So Ventura has world-class beaches, great surf. People come from all over the world to surf Rincon and Sea Street. But we also are 20 minutes into the mountains and the weather doesn't hurt. Poli Street, do you know that we say it wrong? No. So it's named after a doctor that moved here and he actually pronounced his name Dipoli. So like roly-poly. But over the years, it's been changed to Poli.