A box in the shape of days gone by

Historical legacies distinguish museum's library

8/19/2010

We have containers for just about anything these days; look well enough and find something to hold nearly any shape or size. Yet any kid who ever anticipated Christmas day knows something about the folly of trying to divine the contents of a package by the size and shape (or rattle) of the box.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the plain staircase that climbs from the lobby of the Museum of Ventura County offers no clue to the treasure that lies above. By the same token, it must be regarded as no less than the most arcane magic that the 1,500 square feet at the top of those stairs serves as a container, not merely for the myriad maps, plans, drawings, books, photographs, periodicals and more that make up the collection of the museum’s library. Far more than that, the container actually holds time — or at least a key to our past.

Librarian Charles Johnson has, for the last 21 years, served as the custodian of that key for the countless people who’ve made good use of the library’s historical trove, assisted by the invaluable support of nearly two dozen volunteers. Despite his seemingly voluminous knowledge of the repository’s riches, and the centuries catalogued therein, he makes it clear that he is not, himself, a historian. “I serve as a sort of tour guide to the collection, for the people who use it,” he explains. “I’m not a historian, but I work with them all the time — you get in more trouble as a historian than you do as a librarian!”

The collection houses some 50,000 photographs, a quarter of a million negatives, 5,000 books, 700 sets of architectural plans, 5,000 maps (most of which are off-site for the sake of space), 300 linear feet of manuscript material; and much more. “The depth of this collection is formidable,” Johnson notes. “We get very deep on some subjects. So we get used by archaeologists, by historians, by genealogists, architectural historians, people doing chain of title, people wanting to find out if they have contamination in the soil.” He explains that the richness of the collection is most evident when diverse materials are combined to paint a multilayered chain of evidence. “We’re constantly re-combining materials to get at whatever the question is,” he says, “and I think that’s where I come in.

With my familiarity with the collection, we can begin to map out a strategy to answer a question — and it’s nearly always trying to get a picture of a place in time; whether it’s a person, or a building, or what was happening on a piece of land.”

That process came in handy recently as the museum property was being dug up in the renovation process, and a skeleton was unearthed beneath the parking lot. Experts were called in, a more careful excavation commenced, until the intact skeleton of a mule was revealed, complete down to the bullet in the skull that ended its life. “Upon examination, they told us this animal was a pet. It hadn’t been killed for food; it lived a long life,” he recounts. “So we knew roughly when it lived, we knew where it died, so just for fun we went looking and came up with this.” He presents a black-and-white photograph of land adjacent to the old Mission orchard, the same land where the museum now sits, and sure enough, there tethered is one well-fed, seemingly content mule. “I can’t say this is the same mule,” Johnson laughs, “but there he is. You decide.”

Watching Johnson ply his trade is a fascinating walk through lives and times that may be long gone, but whose echoes resound to this day. He presents a large reproduction of a photograph overlooking the Mission district, open land between widely scattered buildings reaching all the way to the shore, his fingers walking from one landmark to the next as if he had himself walked those 19th century paths. The image has that unequivocal clarity that characterized the large-format glass plates of the dawn of photography. “This particular photograph was taken in May of 1882 by a man named John Calvin Brewster, who was our first resident photographer,” he notes. “We are here, this is ‘hotel row,’ this is the Mission, here’s Figueroa, and this large racetrack is where the fairgrounds will one day be. This is Chinatown, which will be gone in another 10 years . . ..” He pauses to look up from the remarkable image to muse, “Sometimes we wish we could just climb into a photo and walk down the street.” From this vantage point, it seems he’s doing just that.

“In spite of eBay, in spite of Craigslist, in spite of all those things, we’re still growing by about 2,500 images a year,” Johnson notes. “We had two donations just this morning, spectacular things — people still do think of us. The first day we reopened the museum after the renovation, we had a donation in the first two hours. There are these bibliographic ghosts, which are things that are referred to that we’ve never seen. But sometimes we actually get to see them; sometimes they do surface, and that’s really, to this day, the primary way that we acquire material, through donation.
“Fifteen hundred square feet,” he muses. “This is my world.” It may seem like a humble container — and will in fact get a new, larger home in a future phase of the museum’s renovation — but as a container for our lives and times and, more importantly, for those that came well before us, it feels very large, indeed.