Sharon Schendel (center) with San Diego History Center Development and Membership Coordinator Samantha Williams (left) and Executive Director Bill Williams (right)
San Diego History Center Executive Director Bill Lawrence (and Rotarian- he’s a member of San Diego Rotary Club 33) and Development and Membership Coordinator Samantha Williams joined our January 11, 2018 meeting to speak about the Center’s exhibits and show a few of the highlights of their collections. This year the Center will celebrate the 90th anniversary of its founding in 1928 by civic leader George Marston. Originally called the Junipero Serra Museum and housed on Presidio Hill, in 1982 the museum moved to its current location in Balboa Park’s Prado, where it occupies a 50,000 ft2 facility.
The Center seeks to collect, preserve, display and interpret the history of San Diego by offering content that provides a variety of perspectives to bring people together through a shared understanding of the past. Bill showed some of the most precious documents among the Center’s 45 million: a recently discovered document bearing Abraham Lincoln’s signature and the diary of Ah Quin, a Chinese labor organizer in San Diego during the 1880s that gives insight into working immigrants. The Center also has over 2.5 million photos of San Diego’s past, 17,000 objects related to the area, 1,700 pieces of fine art with San Diego and California themes, and one of the best costume collections in the nation.
The Center’s Oral History Program, established in 1955, has recordings of San Diego pioneers, and continues today to collect stories of a range of San Diegans from different backgrounds. The Center also publishes The Journal of San Diego History a triannual peer-reviewed journal that features scholarly articles on the history of the area. History Center members receive the Journal as part of their membership. Bill and Samantha brought with them the Summer/Fall 2017 issue for club members to take home. That issue included an article about the American Red Star Animal Relief Program at Camp Kearny during World War I and the Moreton Bay fig tree in Balboa Park.
Bill ended his talk with a Del Mar-specific trivia contest that in which members were asked to guess the name and year of a series of photos. Those who provided correct answers got a copy of the photo to keep (anyone who missed out or would like to see other photos available for purchase can visit the photo archive).