TRACING THE PAST IN FAIR OAKS:
INTERPRETATION AND EXHIBIT DESIGN IN A LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM
A Project
Presented to the faculty of the Department of History
California State University, Sacramento
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
History
(Public History)
by
Sarah Christine Starke
SPRING 2013
© 2013
Sarah Christine Starke
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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TRACING THE PAST IN FAIR OAKS:
INTERPRETATION AND EXHIBIT DESIGN IN A LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM
A Project
by
Sarah Christine Starke
Approved by:
______, Committee Chair Patrick Ettinger, PhD.
______, Second Reader Christopher Castaneda, PhD.
______Date
iii
Student: Sarah Christine Starke
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the project.
______, Graduate Coordinator ______Patrick Ettinger, PhD. Date
Department of History
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Abstract
of
TRACING THE PAST IN FAIR OAKS:
INTERPRETATION AND EXHIBIT DESIGN IN A LOCAL HISTORY MUSEUM
by
Sarah Christine Starke
This thesis explains the process by which I worked as a historical consultant to plan, design, and fabricate two exhibits for the Fair Oaks Historical Society’s new History
Gallery. The first exhibit was a permanent exhibit that highlighted the history of Fair
Oaks, titled “Traces of the Past: History of Fair Oaks.” The second exhibit, titled
“Nourishing the Dream: Water and the Development of Fair Oaks,” was a temporary exhibit on the role of water in the development of Fair Oaks. This thesis reviews the literature on museum studies and exhibit design that I used to guide my work. In preparing these exhibits, I conducted primary and secondary source research, produced narratives, created interpretive panels, and selected artifacts from the Historical Society’s collections for display.
______, Committee Chair Patrick Ettinger, PhD.
______Date
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PREFACE
My first two internships for the Public History program focused on archival work.
I enjoyed discovering photographs and records and preserving them for future research use. I also helped conduct preliminary research for patrons of the archives. During my internship at the Roseville Public Library History Room, I was offered a chance to design a small exhibit marking the centennial of the local Carnegie library. I found that I enjoyed the exhibit design more than archiving historical documents. I conveyed this to my former Museum Studies instructor Larry Bishop, who worked as a museum technician at the California Museum and also taught our class in the program.
During the summer between my first and second year in the program, Bishop offered me an apprentice-type position with him on his consulting project for the Fair
Oaks Historical Society. The Society secured a building in Historic Fair Oaks and was interested in turning it into a museum and venue for meetings and events. Most importantly, they wanted to display some kind of historical exhibit that gave credit to the
Fair Oaks Water District, which had donated the building. The Historical Society contacted Bishop, who asked for my help. My role in this project was not to be an intern; rather, Bishop offered me the project and creative control over the process and design; he would “shadow” me and supervise my work. In October, we began our work.
The decision to make this project my thesis project was easy. Although I feel I have contributed a lot to the public history field as a graduate student, this is clearly the most important accomplishment I have achieved during my time in the program. The project also presented me with the greatest challenges—both academic and personal—I vi
have ever faced. During the process I discovered a passion for this type of work and also learned that it comes naturally to me. I hope to make exhibit design part of my career as a public historian.
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DEDICATION
To Zack and Sherman
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am forever indebted to several individuals for making this project successful.
My dad sat with me for hours strategizing ways to be a good consultant creating an excellent product for her clients. He was the picture-perfect example of professionalism at all times and inspired me greatly. As my biggest cheerleader and a former graduate student who also completed a master’s thesis project, my mom cheered me on every step of the way, even when I didn’t realize there were steps worth cheering. She provided invaluable support when I needed it the most. My sister, even from thousands of miles away, sat with me on Skype for hours discussing the ins and outs of my project, giving me strength and comfort during the stressful times and laughter and joy during the good times.
I am also very grateful for the guidance and inspiration from Larry Bishop, who taught me everything I needed to know to launch a career in this field. I have always been in awe of his talent and drive and I know that in the future, when faced with an exhibit problem that requires focus and creativity, I will always ask myself, “What would Larry do?” Additionally, I am grateful for the support and friendship of Lola Aguilar, who was my practice audience for presentations, helped me pronounce names correctly, and gave extremely valuable input and direction to my work. I would also like to thank Ralph
Carhart for his patience, kindness, wisdom, and guidance. He worked diligently to ensure that my needs were met during this project, and went out of his way to accommodate all parties involved in the creation of the exhibits.
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I will always be grateful for the guidance and wisdom of Dr. Patrick Ettinger. Dr.
Ettinger listened to my problems and gave me the green light to make some tough decisions as a historian. Throughout my three years in the program, I have always been able to count on Dr. Ettinger to help me grow as a public historian and to nudge me in new directions that open up a wide array of possibilities for my career. I am also grateful for the input and wisdom from Dr. Christopher Castaneda, who was my second reader and had excellent advice regarding the stickier situations that arose in my project. Dr.
Castaneda was a wonderful source of guidance and support both in his classes and his role as a reader for this project.
Finally, I am eternally indebted to my husband Zack. A historian himself, he edited text, gave me additional insight into my interpretations, gave me hugs when I was stressed, attended my presentations, and helped me identify potential primary and secondary sources that might help my exhibits. He made me laugh, he helped me write difficult emails, and he took our dog on walks when I simply was too stressed and short on time to do it myself. He gave me so much support and love during this project that I worry I might not ever be able to repay him, but I will try for the rest of my life.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Preface...... vi
Dedication...... viii
Acknowledgements...... ix
Chapter
1. THE HEART OF CALIFORNIA: A HISTORY OF FAIR OAKS...... 1
Early Inhabitation (Pre-contact to 1895)...... 1
Settlement and Colonization (1895-1914)...... 6
The Agricultural Era (1895-1932)...... 11
Modernization and Postwar Suburbanization (1940-1970)...... 15
Conclusion...... 19
2. MUSEUM LITERATURE...... 22
Contemporary Museum Practices...... 23
Role of the Museum...... 28
Conclusion...... 40
3. EXHIBIT DESIGN LITERATURE...... 42
Collecting...... 42
Interpretation...... 46
Exhibit Design...... 53
Visitor Experience...... 64
Conclusion...... 70 xi
4. HISTORY GALLERY PROJECT: PLANNING...... 71
5. HISTORY GALLERY PROJECT: DESIGN AND FABRICATION...... 78
6. CONCLUSION...... 95
Appendix A...... 99
Appendix B...... 102
Appendix C...... 110
Bibliography...... 166
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1
CHAPTER 1
THE HEART OF CALIFORNIA: A HISTORY OF FAIR OAKS
Fair Oaks is a small community located about twenty miles northeast of
Sacramento. Situated along the north fork of the lower American River, Fair Oaks has a rich history that spans 4,000 years, from the inhabitation of the native Nisenan Maidu to the present. This chapter examines the history of Fair Oaks and the research I conducted for the Fair Oaks Historical Society’s History Gallery project. Although the focus of my research was on the general social and economic history of Fair Oaks, I also performed additional research highlighting the role of water in the development of Fair Oaks.
Four main time periods characterize the history of Fair Oaks. These time periods are not discrete; in fact, they overlap, the dates are rough estimates, and my interpretation regarding this chronology varies from the “official” narratives put forth by the Fair Oaks
Historical Society.1 These include: early inhabitation (pre-contact to 1894); settlement and colonization (1895-1915); the agricultural era (1895-1932); and modernization and postwar suburbanization (1940-1970).
I. Early Inhabitation (Pre-contact to 1895)
The earliest inhabitants migrated to California 4,000 years ago.2 The Maidu were the first people to inhabit the lower American River; the tribe lived as far south as
Consumnes River, as far east as the Sierra Nevadas, and as far north as Chico, although
1 The official history put forth by the Historical Society’s resident historian does not differentiate between time periods. The history spans from 1895 when the first Chicago settlers arrived to the “Great Freeze” of 1932, and it is told in a single chronological narrative rather than in overlapping parts. 2 Jesse M. Smith and Lucinda Woodward, A History of the Lower American River (California: American River Natural History Association, 1977), page 9.
2
these are rough estimates for their borders.3 The southern Maidu, the Nisenan (or
Nishinam) Maidu, lived in the area that is now Fair Oaks. The term “Nisenan” was coined by explorer Stephen Powers in 1877 when he arrived in California to document the native peoples.4 The Nisenan Maidu were hunters, gatherers, and fishermen and lived in small villages located near running water; they used the American River to bathe, drink, and fish.5 Instead of migrating at the beginning of each season in search of resources, the Nisenan Maidu bartered and traded with their neighbors.6
The Mission Period in California began in the late eighteenth century and coincides with Spanish control of Alta California. Missions and presidios were the centers of the religious, economic, and cultural systems that historian James Rawls claims
“illustrate well the unique blend of church and crown, of secular and spiritual matters, so characteristic of the Spanish empire.”7 The Spanish missionaries believed that to effectively convert the natives to Christianity, the natives needed to fully conform to
Spanish and European religion, culture, language, social organization, dress, and every other aspect of their lives; they believed the missions would cleanse the natives and
“reduce” them from their “free, undisciplined” state to become “regulated and disciplined members” of Spanish colonial society.8 The missionaries exercised absolute authority
3 Edward Curtis, “The Maidu,” in Vol.14. The Kato. The Wailaki. The Yuki. The Pomo. The Wintun. The Maidu. The Miwok. The Yokuts., vol. 14 of The North American Indian (Boston: Charles Lauriat Company, 1907-1930), page 99. 4 Smith and Woodward, A History of the Lower American River, 12. 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Ibid., 16. 7 James Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” California History 71, no. 3 (Fall 1992), 343. 8 Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” 343.
3 over the “neophytes,” or converted Indians, in matters “both spiritual and temporal.”9
However, when the missionaries advanced up the valley to the American and Sacramento
Rivers, the Miwok tribes along the Sacramento River blocked their advances, and the missionization of the Nisenan never took place.10
Although the missions largely ceased operation by the 1830s, the damage the
Europeans inflicted on the native population was already underway. When the Spanish missionaries and French fur trappers made contact with the natives in northern California, they brought diseases such as smallpox, syphilis, and malaria, to which the natives had no immunity. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, a major malaria epidemic thought to be introduced by ships docking at Fort Vancouver decimated the native population of the central valley; the disease killed seventy five percent of the native population—20,000 individuals—by 1833.11 The Nisenan Maidu population along the American River was especially affected, reduced from 15,000 to 3,000 native inhabitants by 1846.12 With the land newly vacant following the native population decline, Mexican Governor of
California Manuel Micheltorna sold the nearly 20,000 acres including the land that is now Fair Oaks, Orangevale, and Citrus Heights to Joel P. Dedmond in 1844.13 The land, called the Rancho San Juan Grant, was ultimately a great investment—it was only four years later that the gold rush would cause property values to skyrocket in California. Fair
Oaks would eventually transform into a booming city with a new population.
9 Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” 343. 10 Smith and Woodward, A History of the Lower American River, 16. 11 Ibid., 16. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 Ibid., 30.
4
John Marshall discovered the first gold nugget along the American River at John
Sutter’s sawmill at Coloma in 1848, and the area around present-day Fair Oaks exploded with a new population of young gold miners and “dream-seekers” who found prosperity providing goods and services to the young miners.14 Gold mining grew to define the
American River and the settlements along the river, including Rattlesnake Bar and
Mississippi Bar, where two large mining camps were established near present-day Fair
Oaks. Miners along the American River employed three different methods to find gold.
Placer mining required a steady flow of water to sift through the soil in pans and sleuce boxes. Hydraulic mining, an environmentally damaging practice, required large hoses to blast the hillsides with water and shake loose the gold from the soil once the surface gold became too scarce for placer mining. Finally, dredging used large machines that dug soil from the ground, sifted through the soil with river water, and dumped the oversized material or “tailings” behind the dredge.15
During the gold rush in the 1850s, the most common form of mining along the
American River was placer mining. The majority of local placer mining occurred at the upper forks of the American River closer to the Sierra Nevada foothills, but it was still practiced in the lower areas near present-day Folsom and Fair Oaks. Hydraulic mining was never used in Fair Oaks, but was used heavily in nearby Folsom.16 During the twentieth century, dredging was the most heavily used form of gold mining in Fair Oaks.
14 Gary Pitzer, 150 Years of Water: The History of the San Juan Water District, ed. Sue McClurg (Sacramento: Water Education Foundation, 2004), page 8. 15 Bob Brugger, interviewed by Sarah Starke, Shingle Springs, CA, March 5, 2012. 16 Bob Brugger interview.
5
It continued until 1967, when the Fair Oaks-based Natomas Company closed its last dredge and moved operations to Mather Field.17
In 1854, local officials developed new water infrastructure. The American River
Water and Mining Company was established to accommodate these various forms of mining as well as to provide clean bathing and drinking water to the miners at settlements along the river. The American River Water and Mining Company paid over $180,000 to build a thirty-three mile ditch called the North Fork Ditch to bring water to the mining camps at Rattlesnake Bar and Mississippi Bar.18 The company was eventually renamed the North Fork Ditch Company and bought by Crawford W. Clarke, a land baron who controlled most of Dedmond’s San Juan Grant land as well as the water rights of the area.19 This development of water infrastructure suggests that those who settled in the area anticipated, even forty years prior to the colony’s establishment, that it would transform into a booming town in the future.
The San Juan Grant land that would become Fair Oaks grew steadily during the period following the discovery of gold. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in
1869 and the growing enthusiasm along the east coast and midwest for the ideas of
Manifest Destiny brought new immigrants from the east to the Sacramento area with relative ease.20 According to county assessors’ maps, by 1879 there were 300 permanent residents on the San Juan land, which was divided into five- to twenty-acre tracts.
17 Bob Brugger interview. 18 Pitzer, 150 Years of Water: The History of the San Juan Water District,16. 19 Ibid., 20. 20 Public Broadcasting System, “The American Experience: The Transcontinental Railroad” (2003), Documentary Transcript Pdf file, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/tcrr- transcript/ (accessed January 19, 2013).
6
Pioneers from the east may have come to the Sacramento area for the gold, but once the gold became more scarce and it was clear that mining was no longer a lucrative industry, they stayed for the rich land, temperate climate, and rolling hills that presented seemingly boundless agricultural opportunities. As the promise of gold drifted away, the promise of settlement, subdividing, and land speculation started to sprout in the entrepreneurial and business-savvy hearts that resided in the San Juan Grant land. Investors began to see the golden financial opportunities that the land presented. Historian Patricia Limerick describes this sentiment perfectly when she explains a widespread Gold Rush lesson: “in the mining districts, there were far more appealing ways to make money more than mining... greater rewards lay in mining the miners, especially in profiting from their disputes and conflicts over claims and property.”21
II. Settlement and Colonization (1895-1914)
Throughout the country, the Homestead Act of 1862 allotted land to individuals who were willing to live on and improve it; in many instances, “maintaining” the land meant getting there, subdividing it, and then reselling the sections at an enormous profit to the highest bidders, which were often the “dream-seekers” from the east. Limerick explains that land speculation “like so many activities in the American West... could shift meaning when viewed from different angles.”22 To the investor accumulating profit, “it was just another legitimate reward for getting there first—for having the nerve, the
21 Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 64. 22 Ibid., 67.
7 enterprise, and the instinct to acquire title at the right time,” yet to those who came later and faced inflated prices for much smaller plots of land, “speculation was an economic activity bordering on criminality and playing on unfair advantage; speculative profits were an unearned increment by which selfish individuals took advantage of the innocent and hard-working, whose labors constituted the real improvement of the country.”23
Although the first owners of the San Juan Grant land—businessman Crawford Clarke and
California Senator Frederick Cox—did not obtain the land from the Homestead Act, they mimicked the behavior of these early western land owners by subdividing and selling to the small population of settlers (around 300) that arrived following the gold rush. Clarke strictly controlled the water rights of the area, echoing Limerick’s sentiment that the speculators “played on unfair advantage.” In 1895 a new set of investors from Chicago saw an investment opportunity in the rolling hills and rich river bluffs, and they made an offer to purchase the land and water rights from Crawford and Cox that was too good to refuse.
In 1895, Chicago-based printers Charles H. Howard and James W. Wilson of the
Howard-Wilson Publishing Company secured the rights to sell the San Juan Grant land.24
Because they were a well-established eastern publishing company, they enjoyed easy access to printed material and the ability to cheaply and effectively advertise the dream in the west—specifically, in their holdings in Fair Oaks. General Howard named the settlement after a Civil War battle in Fair Oaks, Virginia.25 The Howard-Wilson
23 Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the American West, 67. 24 Paul J.P. Sandul and Lee M.A. Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks (San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), page 9. 25 Ibid., 9.
8
Company printed several pamphlets, brochures, posters, and advertisements that showed photographs of Fair Oaks’ rolling hills, the American River, and the bluffs. The advertisements all appealed to a sentiment in the east that not only was California a spacious and sunny alternative to the dreary, crowded cities in the East, but it was also a largely untapped property goldmine and could make the easterners’ wildest land, farming, and economic dreams come true. Calling Fair Oaks the “Heart of California” and the “Crown of the Valley,” Howard-Wilson promoted Fair Oaks as one of its “Sunset colonies” in the West. The advertising worked at first, because on October 19th, 1895, the first train of 165 Chicagoan excursionists arrived in Sacramento, and they were promptly taken to Fair Oaks where many of them settled. Howard-Wilson prepared hotel arrangements for these original settlers while they surveyed the land and made their bids to the printing company, but many more people arrived than expected, and several early
Fair Oaks residents spent their initial time in their future homes in tent cities and campsites.26
Despite the major campaign Howard-Wilson launched at the end of the nineteenth century, few new settlers actually materialized after the initial excursionists, and investment in the area diminished. Howard-Wilson dropped its ownership of the area and pulled its business and investment out of Fair Oaks in 1900.27 The Chicago-Fair Oaks
Association banded shortly after; the new association lobbied the government and other potential investors by building a bridge over the American River and a rail station on the southern bank of the river to keep an economic lifeline available to the fledgling
26 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 16. 27 Ibid., 17.
9 colony.28 Shortly after, the Fair Oaks Development Company formed by Sacramento Bee editor Valentine S. McClatchy took over the development of the area and continued the
Howard-Wilson marketing model, hoping to bring back new investments and settlers. In
1902, the Fair Oaks Development Company published an article in Sunset magazine that resembled more of a sales pitch than journalism:
The land recedes in every direction in gentle undulations, giving almost every lot of ground, however small, a good building site with extensive views... the precipitous bluffs along the river, which is the first high ground encountered east of Sacramento, are about one hundred and fifty feet in height... All along the bluffs, and, in fact, all over the colony, excepting where replaced by orchards, the land is richly covered in spring and summer with a profusion of wild flowers and is thickly dotted with great, live-oak trees, which attest, in the strongest way, the depth and fertility of the soil... along the bluff, the view is one of unusual extent and beauty. Across the gentle, curving stream below stretch the thousands of acres of vineyards and orchards, while to the east and south-east rise the purple masses and the snow-capped summits of the Sierras. It is only about fifteen miles to Sacramento, and the sunlight may often be seen reflected from the gilded dome of the state capitol.
Accompanying the article was a collage of dream-like photographs of boundless orchards and spacious manors, appealing to the desire of eastern farmers for abundant land and economic prosperity (see Appendix A Figure 1). The houses featured in the photographs are grand Greek Revival, Eastlake, and Queen Anne beacons of wealth, and the photographs of the groves seem to run endlessly for miles, suggesting the good fortune that awaited the farmer if he (or she) settled in Fair Oaks. At the bottom of the collage, an impressive portrait of the Southern Pacific Railroad aids in convincing the reader of Fair
Oaks’ accessibility and modernity. Like its publishing predecessor, the Fair Oaks
28 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 17.
10
Development Company did not limit the advertising opportunities for the new land from which they hoped to make a profit.
Fair Oaks grew following the installation of the bridge and rail depot in 1902. The same year, the town’s first doctor, Dr. R.N. Bramhall, set up practice in Fair Oaks and the first general store was established by Francis Murphy. The store also served as a town hall and public building where villagers could relax and socialize at the Murphy Building and still remains today and functions as one of the community’s prized cultural treasures.29 Over the next few years, a hardware store, auto stage lines and shops, a bank, cafes, and a pharmacy were established, and by 1910 the Fair Oaks Village had a bustling local economy and a loyal customer base. Also at this time, the neighboring San Juan
Grant land communities of Orangevale and Citrus Heights rapidly expanded and organized. Pioneer families such as the Deweys, the Slocums, the Ruggles, the
Cunninghams, the Murrays, and the Hinseys helped build Fair Oaks, and to this day their influence and success is widely celebrated among members of the community. The Fair
Oaks Historical Society membership includes many direct descendants of these pioneer families.
In addition to a local economy, the colony transformed into a fully-functioning municipality. A public school system was officially installed in 1898 and the Fair Oaks
Library Association formed in 1908.30 The area’s first high school, San Juan High
School, opened in 1913. Fair Oaks residents also began forming social groups centered on local philanthropy such as the Women’s Thursday Club of Fair Oaks, which was
29 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 33. 30 Ibid., 71.
11 organized to host social events, hold nursing lessons and sewing classes during World
War I and World War II, and raise money and awareness for philanthropic missions.
Around this time, Fair Oaks residents also established the Fair Oaks Social and
Improvement Club.31 The community bonded together through the period of colonization and early settlement, and the socio-cultural structure that emerged fostered a population that quickly became economically prosperous through farming endeavors until 1932.
III. The Agricultural Era (1895-1932)
The subdividers of the land—first Dedmond, then Crawford and Cox, then
Howard-Wilson and finally the Fair Oaks Development Company—all understood the profitability in the land they owned. Howard-Wilson was the first to advertise it as a fruit- growing colony, but the Fair Oaks Development Company ensured the centrality of fruit in Fair Oaks by installing the bridge and rail depot so that produce could be exported to markets in the east. Out of the 2,200 acres of land that were sold in the initial years of subdivision, 1,200 of them were planted with lemons, oranges, olives, and almonds.32 By
1900, over 1,000 acres in Fair Oaks were planted with oranges. By 1903, half of the residents of Fair Oaks listed in the City and County Register were orchardists, farmers, or fruit growers. Moreover, fruit was so central to the new colony that the arriving settlers from the east were all greeted with blue, white, and gold satin badges that read:
Ah who would not live beyond the read of the snows, ‘Mid the fragrance of orange, the lemon and rose, With the almond and olive and vine on the lea,
31 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 93. 32 Ibid., 19.
12
In the summerland breeze late kissed by the sea, Where all of nature’s bounties are fairest and free?33
Dreams of economic success through the endless possibilities of fruit farming drove pioneers to settle in other parts California as well.
The construction of the rail depot and bridge were the crucial steps in aiding the agricultural market in its economic explosion during this period. After the Southern
Pacific Railroad Company began its operations in Fair Oaks, farmers were able to ship their fruit to out-of-state markets. In 1902, the newly incorporated Fair Oaks Fruit
Company built a warehouse in Fair Oaks to accommodate the growing amount of produce shipped out daily, and by 1906 Fair Oaks farmers shipped 743 tons of fruit, or
150 carloads of oranges and fifty carloads of lemons annually to nearby and out-of-state markets.34 The railroad also brought an influx of new immigrants, many of whom found work on the local farms, and the local Japanese, Chinese, Hispanic, and East Indian population in Fair Oaks rapidly expanded.35 Farmers and orchardists also employed San
Juan High School students to work in the groves for school credit. By 1920, the Fair Oaks
Fruit Company manufactured canned olives and olive oil under the San Juan Brand label.36
The challenge of bringing water to the fruit farms was constant. The earliest farmers in Fair Oaks were forced to deal with the fallout from the Lux v. Haggin decision in 1886. In the late 19th century, Miller and Lux Land and Cattle Company claimed riparian rights to the water that flowed along the Kern River in the San Joaquin Valley
33 Smith and Woodward, A History of the Lower American River, 133. 34 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 19. 35 Smith and Woodward, A History of the Lower American River, 133. 36 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 31.
13 through their property boundaries. James Haggin diverted water from the river for irrigation by means of appropriation and the riparian flow was significantly diminished in the portion of the river that ran through Miller and Lux’s land.37 Miller and Lux sued
Haggin and the lower court sided with Haggin; however, three years later the California
Supreme Court reversed the ruling and sided with Charles Lux, beginning what became known as the “California Doctrine” of riparian water rights.38 Farmers throughout
California, including Fair Oaks, faced an uphill battle when trying to divert water to irrigate their land.
Shortly after Lux v. Haggin and the establishment of Fair Oaks as a “Sunset
Colony,” another legal battle regarding water rights emerged; yet this time, the farmers in
Fair Oaks were on the winning side and their victory secured steady water—and consequently, economic success. At the turn of the twentieth century, hydroelectric power emerged as an important factor in city development and the newly formed
Sacramento Electric, Gas, and Railway Company (SEG&R) used American River water for the Folsom Powerhouse, which generated electricity for the trolley cars and streetlights in Sacramento.39 However, Crawford Clarke—who held a monopoly in water rights in Fair Oaks—diverted so much of the American River water for the irrigation of the fruit farms in Fair Oaks that electricity was often disturbed and spotty for the rest of the Sacramento area. Clarke, a land baron who owned half of the Fair Oaks in the nineteenth century, had a very strong interest in bringing water to the land to maintain its
37 David Igler, “When Is a River Not a River? Reclaiming Nature's Disorder in Lux v. Haggin,” Environmental History 1, no. 2 (April 1996): 53. 38 Ibid., 54. 39 Pitzer, 150 Years of Water: The History of the San Juan Water District, 24.
14
reputation and image as a luscious fruit colony to attract more buyers from the east. In
1898, the SEG&R sued Clarke and his associates; the judge presiding over the case ruled in Clarke’s favor and water remained diverted for Fair Oaks farms at the expense of reliable hydroelectric power for Sacramento’s growing population of residents.40
Although it was a loss for Sacramento in general, the decision in the Clarke case was a victory for Fair Oaks farmers, and reversed the pain that came from losing appropriated water rights after Lux v. Haggin a little over a decade earlier.
Although Fair Oaks farmers enjoyed relatively steady access to water to irrigate their orchards and farms, other farmers in California were not so lucky. In 1887, these downtrodden and water-deprived farmers banded together and persuaded Assemblyman
Christopher Wright to pen the Wright Act of 1887, which established irrigation districts and diminished the detrimental effects of riparian rights on dryland farming.41 The new law’s effect on Fair Oaks materialized when the Fair Oaks Irrigation District was established on March 16th, 1917, and the district purchased the water from the Clarke- owned North Fork Ditch Company to irrigate the 4,000 acres of fruit farms in Fair
Oaks.42 Before the Wright Act, California farmers were constantly on guard and left wondering if their steady supply of water would exist the next day; after water districts were formed, they could rest easy knowing their water supply—and livelihoods—were stable. Although Fair Oaks farmers had easier access to water before the establishment of
40 Pitzer, 150 Years of Water: The History of the San Juan Water District, 24. 41 Ibid., 35. 42 Ibid., 35.
15 the water district, the new law enforced the steady supply and kept farming a lucrative industry in the community.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, fruit farmers continued to enjoy economic prosperity. The Olive Packing Plant crushed fifteen tons of raw olives daily, and the citrus crops were shipped to the east coast daily.43 Fair Oaks had such a large production of almonds that Harry and Harold Dewey, members of a pioneer farming family, helped form the California Almond Growers Exchange, a collaborative almond-growing effort that spans nine counties known today as Blue Diamond.44 With fruit as the area’s most valuable export, Fair Oaks continued to draw people in. The area grew during the 1920s and eventually emerged as a community that took part in the national economic, political, and cultural scene.
By 1932 Fair Oaks farmers and residents were already dealing with a struggling economy during the Great Depression when a crippling freeze killed the thriving orchards and crushed their dreams almost overnight. Many former farmers and orchardists adapted by finding work in Sacramento or other surrounding communities, aided by the newly implemented transportation systems and roads. Although the olives managed to survive the “Great Freeze” of 1932, the other fruit did not, and the agricultural era of Fair Oaks ended almost as rapidly as it began.
IV. Modernization and Postwar Suburbanization (1940-1970)
43 Women’s Thursday Club of Fair Oaks, Fair Oaks: The Way It Was 1895-1976 (Fair Oaks: Fair Oaks Historical Society, 2007), page 15. 44 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 29.
16
After the freeze in 1932 and throughout the 1940s, growth in Fair Oaks slowed significantly. Already dealing with a plummeting economy, Fair Oaks struggled to regain economic stability during the latter part of the 1930s. United in their struggle, Fair Oaks residents banded together and fostered community relationships. The Women’s Thursday
Club of Fair Oaks—whose main duty in the years following its establishment included helping out with the national war effort during World War I—volunteered their services to the United Service Organization to feed and entertain soldiers during World War II,; they also offered sewing and first aid courses. By the end of the war, Fair Oaks was able to maintain its characteristic “village mentality” of partnership, coordination, and compassion for neighbors, despite the economic setbacks following the Depression and freeze.
Yet after World War II, the population and city growth in Fair Oaks resembled the national phenomenon of suburbanization. The postwar influx of new residents alongside returning veterans in the communities surrounding Sacramento echoed the national trends of suburban expansion. Historian Robert Self describes this Cold War suburbanization scenario as one in which people were “drawn to suburban communities by the powerful economic and cultural incentives behind city building: new housing markets subsidized by the federal government; low taxes underwritten by relocating industry, and the assurance that a new home, spacious yard, and garage signaled their full assimilation into American life and its celebration of modernity and consumption.”45 The promises of living in the cities during the industrial revolution had given way to the idea
45 Sandul and Simpson, Images of America: Fair Oaks, 16.
17 that there was a better, less corrupt life to live outside the city; some historians believe this period marks a significant “white flight” that left poorer African-American communities in the urban city centers and allowed affluent whites the opportunity to escape the grime and corruption of city life. This process might also be central to the rapid expansion of the population in Fair Oaks following World War II, although it does not alone explain it.
Also critical to the national trend of suburbanization in the “New West” is the easy accessibility to the automobile—families that before the war owned only one car suddenly now owned two or more and commuted longer distances to work, school, and leisure activities; drive-through movie theaters and fast food restaurants help define the cultural landscape of the era. Cars and California were dreams that for many were always linked. Fair Oaks underwent significant changes in this period as new establishments such as automobile repair and hardware shops and drive-up restaurants popped up to serve the growing population of residents with California dreams and multiple cars.
According to Mae Kelly, a Fair Oaks resident who was the subject of an oral history project describing the decade in the 1950s, “it seemed there was a new filling station on every corner.”46 In fact, there were so many new cars driving back and forth to surrounding communities and to Sacramento that the old bridge built in 1902 could no longer hold the weight. The city commissioned the Sunrise Boulevard bridge, which was completed in 1955, to accommodate the explosion of the local car culture.
46 Women’s Thursday Club of Fair Oaks, Fair Oaks: The Way It Was 1895-1976, 15.
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At the same time, Cold War cultural ideology stressed that American superiority
“rested on the ideal of the suburban home.”47 Domesticity reigned, households were modernized with new appliances and up-to-date architectural features such as garages and bomb shelters. City planning changed from square blocks to winding streets, two- and three- way stops and cul-de-sacs, to allow easy flight in the case of a Soviet attack.
According to historian Elaine Tyler May, many Americans in this era believed that a home filled with children “would create a feeling of warmth and security against the cold forces of disruption and alienation.”48 Home life was a stabilizing force, giving rise to the baby boom generation, and Fair Oaks was not immune to these pressures. In fact, so many new children lived in Fair Oaks during the postwar suburbanization phase that four new schools—John Holst School, Kenneth Avenue School, Earl Legette School, and
Bella Vista High School—were established between 1950-1960 in Fair Oaks alone.
Additionally, the San Juan Unified School District was created in 1958 to accommodate the increasing new structural problems that the schools faced with such a rapidly expanding school-age population.
All these factors contributed to the rapid modernization of Fair Oaks during the decades following World War II, yet none of them specifically explain why Fair Oaks grew so much during the period. In 1955, the Aerojet-General Corporation, a company that produced rocket engines for government-run and private enterprises, brought their development, testing, and production operations to a new facility near present-day
47 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1990), page 11. 48 May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 17.
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Rancho Cordova. Aerojet, itself a product of the Cold War economy, made engines for the Titan, Polaris, and Minuteman missile programs. In the age of space exploration, the company made engines for the Gemini, the Viking, and the Voyager missions, the Apollo
Command Module, and the Space Shuttle. Aerojet brought thousands of jobs to the area and rapidly transformed Fair Oaks from an agricultural economy into an industrial center.
By 1963, Aerojet employed 20,000 people, and many of them lived in Fair Oaks.
Resident Mae Kelly, who worked in a Fair Oaks bank during the 1950s, remembers that to the routine question she asked of prospective depositors, “Where are you employed?”, most customers replied, “Aerojet, where else?”49 When Aerojet’s Titan contract was complete in the mid-1960s, the company laid off 17,500 workers in four and a half years.
Aerojet remains the largest provider of propulsion systems in the United States, but its role in Fair Oaks after the Cold War significantly diminished.
V. Conclusion
The Fair Oaks Historical Society held its first meeting in 1975. Officially up and running by 1977, the Historical Society’s main purpose was to “preserve the history and heritage of Fair Oaks.”50 It took the Society twenty years to amass their research into a book, titled The Early Years of Fair Oaks, which was published in 1995. The memories contained in this book and in their preserved narratives largely focus on the earliest pioneer families, and most of their members are the descendants of these families. Today, the Historical Society serves mainly as a repository of the main historical collections.
49 Women’s Thursday Club of Fair Oaks, Fair Oaks: The Way It Was 1895-1976, 44. 50 According to their website.
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Many of the members of the Historical Society specialize in particular areas of Fair Oaks history, such as schools, Aerojet, mining, bridges, and other topics, creating a knowledgable human database that will be preserved for generations of Fair Oaks residents in the future.
The collection of historical narratives the Historical Society wishes to preserve for future generations is an excellent example of the trends in local history outlined in the next chapters, and how successes are celebrated and counter-narratives are often missing.
In conducting the research for this chapter and for the project, I was uncomfortable with the lack of diversity in voices from Fair Oaks’ past, which may perhaps only be the result of a lack of diversity in voices within the Historical Society and the lack of available resources to research and gather these narratives. The stories that were told came from successful (white) pioneer descendants, therefore much of the historical record beyond the successful white foundation of the colony is missing, especially following the freeze of 1932. The Historical Society’s collection is also missing a picture of what Fair Oaks looked like during important times in national and state history such as the civil rights and feminist movements during the 1960s. There is almost nothing on the experiences of ethnic minorities in the history of Fair Oaks. The Historical Society may not have these narratives because the residents who author them are simply uninterested in contributing them to the Historical Society, or are unaware that their narratives are important to create a well-balanced local history canon. Repositories of local history must become safe environments in which residents can contribute these narratives without worry of prejudice or belittlement.
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Yet within the historical record of the Historical Society, controversy is avoided; there is virtually nothing in the collections that illustrates any of the anti-war sentiment in
Fair Oaks during Vietnam, for example, or the experiences of LGBT residents of Fair
Oaks throughout the decades. These narratives certainly exist in Fair Oaks’ history; they might not even be consciously ignored by the Historical Society, but rather just brushed aside in favor of what the members already know and can relay to future generations confidently without stirring up any trouble.
These residents are personally invested in the narratives passed down from the founding generation to theirs. The local history is not perfect, it lacks significant measures of diversity and multiculturalism, and includes some of California history’s less savory acts (land speculation, for example). But it unites the residents in a way that state and national history narratives do not. The members of the Historical Society and the current residents claim these narratives of success and celebration and are skeptical of anyone wishing to challenge them. This fact alone makes these narratives fascinating to study.
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CHAPTER 2
MUSEUM LITERATURE
The United States is home to thousands of museums that vary tremendously in size, scope, and content. Museums with huge budgets, large facilities, multi-departmental staffs, major donors with deep pockets, and well-respected Board members may have significantly different developmental processes, types of exhibitions, and collections than the small volunteer-run community museums with operational budgets that sometimes come out of the pockets of a few passionate individuals. Although these differences are stark and often very noticeable in the size and quality of the exhibitions they feature, these institutions—the massive, multi-million dollar museums and the humble, small museums and everything in between—have everything in common at a foundational level. The force that binds them is a fundamental devotion to the public they serve, whether the public is a wide audience of art lovers or a small group of professional toy train enthusiasts. Museums are bound by their roles in their community, their ability to showcase what will really connect with and matter to their visitors, and their purpose to provide elective learning many Americans desire. Public historians in museums have the same duties to their communities whether they work for large or small institutions. Their job is to make history (or art, science, or anthropology) accessible and available to the masses. As public historian Cary Carson explains, “public historians were not put on
Earth to run dog shows or referee Easter egg races, however much revenue they raise for preservation,” and they “must never forget that fundamentally we are history teachers... if
23 our institutions of lifelong learning are not teaching history, or if we are teaching to ever- smaller numbers of learners, than those are the problems we need to tackle and solve.”51
I. Contemporary Museum Practices
Most public historians and museum studies students agree on an institutional definition of the modern American museum. Above all, a museum has an educational purpose and it exhibits, collects, and interprets based on that educational purpose.52
Whereas art museums, science museums, and anthropological museums can cover the basics of several aspects of their fields, history museums often feature a specific subject, such as the Museum of Medical History, the Museum of Monitcello, the Reagan
Presidential Library and Museum, and others. History museums employ public historians who are trained to research the topics of the exhibits, gather artifacts and manage collections that illustrate those topics, create narratives that are interesting and relevant to their specialty, and design thoughtful and meaningful exhibitions that feature their unique footprint on the cultural backdrop of their community. Museums large and small should be united in this definition, although some of the smaller historical museums often do not have the means to formally train their staff in this manner.
Modern history museums, like other types of museums, increasingly follow a new trend in the field that places less emphasis on collections and their “mastery” of a certain subject(s) and instead feature more interactive and participatory learning processes
51 Cary Carson, “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?” The Public Historian 30, no 4 (Summer 2000): 15. 52 G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1997), 24.
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among a wider selection of information and interpretations. Public historians should see this as a major success in the field; museum visitors with an interest in learning and an interest in history will benefit greatly and learn much more from being able to choose their own curriculum. Museum educator and theorist Lisa Roberts explains the outdated museum practice when she states that “by suggesting that they possessed ‘Great Objects’ of ‘Great Value’ that represent ‘Great Traditions,’ museums have traditionally presented their collections according to the Great Books prescription... in so doing, they have privileged a particular mode of knowledge, particular methods and criteria for acquiring it, and a particular class of (usually) professional curators and directors who author—and authorize—it.”53 Yet, unfortunately, aspects of this approach can still be observed in some museums today. Some museums have trouble relinquishing their historical authority and act as gatekeepers of history instead of custodians of history— the latter the ultimate goal of the public historian. These practitioners believe that their narrative is their history, and that the visitor just borrows it with their permission. This attitude can also permeate other cultural institutions such as archives, and it significantly holds back the professionals in the public history field who aim to make history available to all. In effect, these individuals undo the hard work that many professional public historians tirelessly perform when they conduct research and create well-rounded, well-evidenced narratives. However, this archaic attitude seems to mostly be the case in smaller museums, and many medium-sized and larger museums are trending towards postmodern museological approaches.
53 Lisa Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997), 60.
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With the old trend in museums dying out, a new “postmodern” trend emerged.
Jessie Embry and Mauri Liljenquist Nelson describe postmodernism as the “trend of challenging authoritative positions and ideas,” which creates an interpretive situation where no one single authoritative position or focus survives. They argue that “museums are now expected to present various perspectives, highlight unexplored topics, and do this in unique and innovative ways.”54 To buck the authoritative stance of yesterday’s museums, today’s public historians increasingly put the expertise and learning process in the hands of the museum visitors. They ask questions and genuinely solicit responses from the audience instead of preaching what they know best.
One way museums can make sure they conform to contemporary practice standards is through accreditation with the American Alliance of Museums (formerly
American Association of Museums), or AAM. Although not without its own flaws— particularly that there is no rubric or grading system that separates a stellar museum from one that barely makes the cutoff for accreditation—the system designed by the AAM rewards museums that meet stringent professional criteria.55 Stephen Weil, a museologist that works with the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, explains that “in its earliest phase, accreditation was primarily concerned with how an institution cared for its collection and maintained its facilities... with the passage of time, the scope of accreditation has steadily broadened to consider not only the institutional care of collections but also, as importantly, the programmatic use of these collections.”56 To become an accredited
54 Amy Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007), 162. 55 Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002), 59. 56 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 33.
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institution, museum leadership must join AAM, make a Pledge of Excellence, submit documents verifying their educational programs, take part in a one-year self-evaluation program administered by AAM, and then go through a peer-reviewed process to be awarded accreditation.57
Accreditation is not something that many small museums can boast, particularly because their staff are usually not professionals in the museum studies or public history fields, are unaware of the process or the benefits of accreditation, and lack the resources to do the deep introspective structuring before their accreditation inquiry. Larger museums, which tend to borrow and loan their collections, find they are better positioned to get the resources they need for blockbuster exhibitions if they are accredited.
Accreditation also gives them better access to grants and government funds. Small museums, by contrast, lack visibility without accreditation.
Accredited museums with AAM are generally have public programming, a fully developed educational department, and a creative design team. But small museums that also have these assets and are not accredited can also be successful and “good.” Over years of scholarship, Weil developed a set of criteria regarding what it takes to be considered a “good” museum.58 First, Weil states that a museum must be “purposive,” having a clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish. Second, the museum must be capable of accomplishing its purpose—in other words, the institution must have the money and properly trained staff to fulfill its purpose. Third and fourth, the museum must be effective (for example, the visitor leaves understanding what the museum was trying
57 According to the AAM website. http://www.aam-us.org/resources/assessment-programs 58 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 7.
27 to teach them) and efficient (financially, spacially, and in other matters). Weil also advises museums to steer clear of ambiguity, which he describes as “inevitably fatal to the excellence of a museum or other non-profit organization” because it “undermines accountability” and “there are no means by which the effectiveness of such an ambiguously purposed organization can be evaluated.”59
The accountability Weil describes within the institution is crucial. Museum theorist John H. Falk offers another description of accountability when he postulates that museum staff “need to stop seeing these as parts of a whole and start seeing them as a single complex, integrated system... specifically, we need to move away from thinking about types of visitors to types of visits (which vary by identity-related motivations), and from exhibits and programs with specific, singular outcomes to ways of experiencing and using exhibits and programs that allow visitors to achieve multiple, personally relevant goals.”60 The old conception of accountability was based on the scholarship of the curators and the care and preservation of the museum’s collections, but the recent trend in museology is to focus more on the visitor experience and creating a purpose within the institution of helping individual visitors achieve their own educational goals and experiences. Solid leadership among museum staff creates accountability and ultimately leads to a “good” museum, but accountability can also be measured monetarily. The non- profit sector is rapidly changing. Students of business often refer to a “third sector” made up of non-profit institutions, including museums, which work on a system of “positive
59 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 10. 60 John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009), 215.
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accountability”—or “the ability to assure providers that the resources they have provided are being used both effectively and efficiently to accomplish the purposes for which they were intended.”61
In sum, the American museum underwent a massive change in the past few decades. A modern museum is identified by its dedication to education and public service, focuses on the individual visitor experience and learning style, and incorporates open-ended questions and exhibits that provoke meaningful debate among visitors and staff alike. Museums that fit this description can become accredited by the AAM, a prestigious honor and a major reputation-builder among cultural institutions. An excellent museum is one that holds itself accountable to its purpose and goals by having a strong staff that is willing to put in the effort and relinquish some creative and educational control to the visitors. It is also able to demonstrate accountability financially with their donors and members. The role of the museum is also an important topic among theorists and public historians as well.
II. Role of the Museum
There are several articles and books that address the role of local history museums. In addition to Stephen Weil’s Making Museums Matter, I consulted Roy
Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past to learn how visitors use history in several types of museums. I also used Lisa Robert’s book From Knowledge to
Narrative to decipher the role of education in local history museums, and I found
61 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 79.
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Robert’s work helpful in discerning how public historians can use these institutions as centers of learning and education. Other works such as Barbara Howe and Emory
Kemp’s Public History: An Introduction, Carol Kammen’s On Doing Local History:
Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means, and Jo Blatti’s Past
Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences address the role of local history museums and the pitfalls of public history in these venues. In the context of Fair Oaks and the research I conducted for this project, I concluded that there are three roles for the local history museum. First, the museum’s role is to foster community involvement, get visitors and members of the community interested in their heritage, and give them a space to explore their interests and backgrounds. The second role of the modern history museum is to provide a venue for local history to be showcased and discussed (although not necessarily celebrated). Finally, the most important role of the history museum is to educate visitors, recognizing the diversity of visitors, visitors’ interests, and learning styles.
Community involvement is a major concern for museums large and small.
Community members usually make up the visitor audience, inspire the exhibitions, and are usually the pocketbook of a museum. The museum must put the community’s needs first. Weil warns that “the emerging public-service-oriented museum must see itself not as a cause but as an instrument... much of the cost maintaining that instrument is paid by the community;” and for that reason, the community is “legitimately entitled to have some choice—not the only choice, but some choice—in determining how that instrument
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is to be used.”62 John Cotton Dana, a prominent theorist in museum studies during the early twentieth century, instructed his students to learn what the community needs and put those needs first.63
One way to actively engage the community is by creating temporary exhibits, which “provide the opportunity for local group participation” and “enables individuals and groups to do something in and for your museum;” having the community involved in the museum’s educational operation “makes them more interested and makes them more responsible... it is good for people in your community to say ‘our museum.’”64 Stephen
Weil also explains that the museum of the near future “will make available to the community, and for the community’s purposes, its profound expertise at telling stories, eliciting emotion, triggering memories, stirring imagination, and prompting discovery— its expertise in stimulating all those object-based responses.”65 Temporary exhibits also create discussion among the community’s professionals and experts in certain fields.
Temporary exhibits are also a method to bring in new visitors by offering content that is constantly changing, presenting different topics that appeal to a wider audience. They are another way to get additional monetary support by soliciting relevant sponsors, donors, and groups. With the community as its patron and curator, the small museum can be a place where local history enthusiasts can showcase their interests, voices, and collections.
The museum’s second role is to act as a venue to showcase and discuss local history. Large, multi-million dollar budgets and multi-departmental museums are a small
62 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 49. 63 Ibid., 191. 64 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 146. 65 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 200.
31 percentage of the museums in America. The small- and medium- sized museums that make up the majority of museums in the United States are beacons of local history and community heritage. Amy Levin describes the importance of small museums when she explains that “America without its local museums would resemble a supermarket carrying only major brands, impoverished and impoverishing for those who value choice and eclecticism, who seek variety not merely for its own sake but because it is likely to reflect a wider segment of the population.” Small museums run by historical societies or other social groups and clubs can also house the group’s entire collection and archives and serve as the main agent in document and artifact preservation, as well as display interpretive exhibits.
Historical societies, as defined by Burcaw, are organizations that have the purpose of “discovering, preserving, and disseminating important knowledge of past human behavior in a particular region... devoted to archival, library, publication, preservation, or museum work.”66 Many historical societies operate like the Fair Oaks Historical Society, with a Board of Trustees that holds semi-annual meetings and raise revenue, typically through fundraisers attended mostly by dues-paying members of the society and their families. They are comprised of people who have often lived in the community their whole lives and whose families descended from the community’s pioneer families, which they focus on in their exhibits and informal scholarship. Like other small museums, the
Fair Oaks Historical Society is constrained by limited resources, dependent on donated artifacts, furniture, photographs, equipment, and staffed exclusively by volunteers.
66 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 17.
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Sometimes they partner with other community organizations, like the Rotary Club or
Women’s Club, for financial support. Another inherent problem is the scope of their scholarship and research: those in charge at local museums are rarely formally trained historians and only tell a few stories—usually the ones they know, approve of, and are comfortable with. Local history museums usually “grow out of local historical societies,
[are] frequently located in historic houses, and [are] as much concerned with civic virtue... [which is] largely defined by success in politics, the professions, or business.”67
The subject matter “celebrated” in these museums is often that of the community’s first families, particularly those families whose descendants financially support these museums, serve on their Boards, and work in them. As a result, “the stories told in these museums are invariably success stories.”68
One case study highlighted in museum research explains this phenomenon in local history. The Daughters of Utah’s Pioneers (DUP) runs a small museum in Salt Lake
City that mimics the operation and structures of the Fair Oaks Historical Society’s museum. The DUP’s museums are staffed by member volunteers, who “devote little time to the museum... their training is rarely formal.” Most volunteers are older and retired and
“age restricts their activities” but “their devotion and dedication are high... the DUP wants to tell every pioneer story possible, and especially stories of members’ ancestors.”69 The DUP example is indicative of a larger trend of nostalgia in small museums, what Stuart Patterson calls “nostalgic modernism”—“conceived of past and
67 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 199. 68 Ibid., 199. 69 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 167.
33 present as mutually distinct worlds which could be juxtaposed in self-conscious ways to judge the relative merits of tradition and progress.”70 Nostalgic modernism was highly evident in the members of the Fair Oaks Historical Society and the case study example of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. Particularly true about Patterson’s definition is the mention of the self-conscious ways to judge progress and tradition; the narratives that were most appealing to members were narratives of hard work and success among the
(white) members of their community, which ultimately highlight the successes in building their community and even feature some of the hard work of their friends and families. These narratives come at a cost—Levin states “most community history museums celebrate their pasts without critically scrutinizing them... these local museums collect and display documents of a past that is looked back on fondly, wistfully, or proudly, and whose story is told straightforwardly without overtly revealing that anyone’s special narratives are being omitted.”71 Nostalgia, Levin explains, ultimately “valorizes” the positive aspects of their past, “endowing” them as truths, and the events that do not fit this view may be denied or ignored. Furthermore, these endowed truths usually have very little historical evidence and are treated as beliefs while minimizing and marginalizing competing narratives.72 The truths are socially constructed among members; they are
“conscious, coherent vision[s] of the past” that are decided upon among several individuals, approved, authorized and hard to challenge because of their stringent review process.
70 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 110-111. 71 Ibid., 28. 72 Ibid., 93.
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Stephen Weil explains that yesterday’s local museums are at the “nether end” of the good and bad spectrum, meaning they are “infused with earnest enthusiasm and benevolent aspirations” but are constricted by a “largely amateur Board and staff” that seeks to keep that Board and staff feeling good.73 Weil argues that this resembles a
“cultural country club” for those in the Historical Society.”74 But the members of this class of mostly informally trained historians are retiring and passing away, and the younger members of historical societies and local communities must showcase their histories in other ways to modernize and connect with new audiences.
The third and most important role of the museum is education. Education happens in every museum visit, and visitors are voluntary learners. Exhibits and public programming should reflect this and should identify the types of learners and their reasons for visiting to pinpoint the best way to reach them. Museum learning is not the same as that which occurs in a lecture hall or by reading a book. Rather, the learning that takes place in a museum is often experiential, less concrete, more individually specific, and it tends to reaffirm most visitors’ existing knowledge. As Falk explains, “learning tends to take the form of confirmation of existing understandings, attitudes, and skills in order to allow the individual to be able to say, ‘Okay, I now know that I know/believe that.’”75 The goal is not “mastery in the traditional sense, but rather to provide the individual a feeling of personal confidence.”76
73 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 10. 74 Ibid., 10. 75 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 61. 76 Ibid., 61.
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Educational goals in museums now are much more interactive and participatory.
Museum educators talk about “meaning-making,” encouraging visitors to interpret on their own and create new narratives to round out the overall visitor experience. The modern educational history museum now has an agenda for learning, which Smithsonian director Nigel Briggs states should be transparent. The museum should “[acknowledge] the decisions it makes about what is displayed (and what is not), what is said (and what is not said), who is allowed to say it (and who is not)... the museum, and especially the curator, holds great power over the visitor and the artifacts and is able—even expected— to impose their prejudices upon them.”77 Making these interpretive decisions transparent to the visitor will assist in conveying to them that their interpretation is not the only one and the visitor can draw their own conclusions, which are equally valuable and valid.
Lisa Roberts describes museum education as “not just about museums teaching visitors; it is about visitors using museums in ways that are personally significant to them... the essence of the education enterprise is thus the making of meaning.”78 One example that highlights Roberts’ concept of meaning-making is a museum that might feature an exhibit on Greek pottery. If the exhibit includes interpretive exhibit labels, a visitor who is a descendant of Greek immigrants and raised with an appreciation and knowledge of Greek pottery may not learn anything new from the interpretive narrative like a casual museum visitor. However, she may connect in a way to the collections and interpretive information in a way that teaches her new things about herself, her ancestors, and maybe even her surroundings and her own circumstances. To Roberts, this type of
77 Nigel Briggs, “Reaching a Broader Audience.” The Public Historian 22, no. 3 (Summer 2000), 97. 78 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 132-133.
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learning is still educational and defines the “meaning-making” activity that museologists and public historians celebrate. Most museum educators support Roberts in this theory— museum exhibits are less about the dates, the names, the places, and the facts, and more about meaning-making among the individual visitors and the way they learn and connect with the narratives. Levin explains that “visitors pick and choose their curriculum on the basis of criteria the staff can never fully know, and no two visitors select the same curriculum.”79
Because the learning experience varies from visitor to visitor, Jan Packer suggests that educators and exhibit designers keep five propositions in mind about the nature of learning in museums. First, museums visitors are voluntary learners and by visiting a museum are electively “learning for fun,” which “encompasses a mixture of discovery, explorations, mental stimulation and excitement.”80 Visitors want to learn things through discovery and exploration, perhaps through interactive and participatory exhibits and engaging public programming, rather than through lecture-style exhibit labels; they also want to learn without having curators impose strict narratives on them. Such narrow storylines are an issue in small museums such as the DUP and Fair Oaks Historical
Society. Second, most visitors consider learning fun and enjoyable.81 Since many people equate museums with some form of educational output, paying admission is evidence that a visitor is interested in the subject matter offered in a museum, subject matter that is presented in a different way from reading a book or hearing a lecture. Not all visitors will
79 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 30. 80 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 57. 81 Ibid., 57.
37 openly and consciously declare that they are there specifically to learn; Packer’s third proposition states that although some visitors do not deliberately visit a museum with the sole intention to learn, they do “seek or are unconsciously drawn into an experience that incorporates learning.”82 Fourth, Packer explains that visitors in her research were able to identify four conditions that made learning in museums fun: a “sense of discovery or fascination,” “appeal to multiple senses,” “the appearance of effortlessness,” and “the availability of choice.”83 Exhibits should offer multiple choices for multiple types of visitors and learners, appeal to all senses by creating interactive and audio/visual exhibits as well as artifacts or facsimiles that visitors can touch and experience for themselves, and appear “effortless,” not weighing down the interpretation and experience with clinical information that makes learning laborious. While exhibit designers and public historians in museums strive to create this type of educational exhibit, curators oftentimes are more interested in presenting the specialized information rather than making that information accessible to the masses. Even more detrimental to the overall experiential learning experience are exhibits that present nostalgic, celebratory, and evidence-lacking narratives as truth in imposing formats that “teach down” to visitors rather than together with visitors. Such is the case in many local history museums. Finally, Packer’s fifth proposition states that “visitors value learning for fun because it is a potentially transformative experience.”84 When designing exhibits, public historians and museum workers must constantly keep these ideas in mind.
82 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 57. 83 Ibid., 57 84 Ibid., 57.
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Museum theorist Beverly Serrell gives exhibit designers several ideas and choices to make when keeping these learning propositions in mind.85 She describes a sequenced and unsequenced type of exhibition, which relate to the visitor’s interaction with the physical space. Some people learn more effectively when a lesson is laid out in an order that is easy to follow physically (sequenced). Others learn better when they can choose the order of their lesson, preferring exhibits that are arranged in a way that does not direct the visitor in a single order (unsequenced.) Serrell also outlines a type of exhibition that is pace-controlled. This involves a learning experience that has a finite time frame, such as a video or a docent-led tour, that provides time frames for types of interactive (“push a button for a three minute video” or “wait here for an hour-long docent-led tour”). On the contrary, an exhibit can have elements that are not time-controlled, letting visitors choose their own learning pace. An exhibit can also either offer visitors an opportunity to talk to their family and friends about what they see, read, or experience (peer group) or it can speak at the visitor through labels and interactive through an expert voice for those visitors that prefer someone knowledgeable to teach them (authority-led). Authority-led exhibits are a dying trend; in most cases, designers will mute the expert voice and instead present information as a fluid, dynamic interpretation, sometimes in first-person narratives.
Serrell offers more sets of didactic exhibit choices that designers and public historians can make when designing their exhibits. An exhibit can give visitors concrete experiences, when the visitors can see, feel, hear, or do things directly and labels respond
85 Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1996), 53-59. All the following types are described in this chapter.
39 to the visitors’ most immediate questions. Alternatively, an exhibit can offer abstract experiences, which present abstract information through reading lengthy books, pamphlets, or brochures rather than label text and experiential learning through seeing or doing.86 Serrell also illustrates the decision by designers to present verbal stimuli
(through labels, who some visitors find intrusive and imposing) or nonverbal stimuli
(which is usually the case in art museums, when visual objects are used in a way that do not tell the visitor how to feel or how to interpret.) Finally, Serrell differentiates between a type of exhibition that alternates between concentration and relaxation and offers opportunities for both for different people that “have different preferences and tolerance levels for the ambiance of exhibition spaces.”87
Recent scholarship on museum learning presents education as an increasingly multifaceted effort among several individuals in the museum setting. Additionally, museums are now in the business of asking visitors to help shape educational output and narratives, whether they have expertise in the field of study or whether they interpret the collections and storylines differently than others and can provide additional insight into the subject at hand. Roberts describes a museum scenario in which educators:
instituted reforms in their interpretive activities that treat knowledge as not only a productive endeavor but also a shared venture: for example, they have involved the wider community in interpreting collections; legitimized a range of possible meanings and outcomes of a museum visit; and begun to expose the meaning- making activities performed by museums... interpretation thus conceived is the business of not just those who possess special knowledge but also those who possess any knowledge and relation to the collections at hand.88
86 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 56-59. 87 Ibid., 58. 88 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 56.
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The roles of local history museums are like a three-legged stool. Without one of the legs, the other opportunities for the museum are less stable and successful. Without community involvement, the museum has no audience and lacks a major avenue to hold themselves accountable. Without a venue to showcase local history, small groups in that community would not have a way to display important parts of the local heritage to be preserved for future generations. And without an educational goal, visitors will gain little from their experience; the museum experience would resemble browsing through an antique store or playing fun interactive carnival games. The museum’s roles are crucial when designing exhibits and understanding visitor experience. A public historian designing an exhibit must keep the community in mind, ask for their input and expertise, and understand that community members are the financial supporters of the institution. A public historian designing a small museum exhibit on local history must keep in mind that the preservation, documentation, and display of historical artifacts are rapidly changing but are no less critical to the heritage of a small community and important for future generations. And finally, a public historian must keep education at the top of their priorities in designing exhibits. An exhibit must not simply showcase interesting artifacts, but also teach visitors to react introspectively to those artifacts to learn more about themselves and their heritage.
III. Conclusion
In the next chapter, I will discuss the theory and methods behind exhibit design and visitor experience. In my research, I found that both were necessary to explain the
41 other, and they complemented each other nicely. Exhibit designers and public historians must keep the visitor’s unique identity and motivation for visiting as the top priority during the design stage to ensure the historical messages are adequately transmitted and the visitor has an ultimately rewarding experience. Although every designer, like every artist, has a unique sense of creativity and design style, basic methods and theories underlie their work and ensure continuity and consistency among museum visits. It ultimately bodes well for museums as a whole if these designers can positively affect a visitor’s experience and let the desired audience know that museums are not just attics or antique stores, and alternatively, they are not just theme parks or arcades either.
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CHAPTER 3
EXHIBIT DESIGN LITERATURE
If the main operation of the museum and the marker of what makes it successful are strong education-related goals, the vehicle that accomplishes these goals are the exhibits. The planning, the design, and the fabrication/installation all depend on a museum’s model of collecting and interpreting, and the final outcome of the exhibit is heavily dependent on successful design that integrates the modern museological theory and the wide range of potential visitor experiences, identities, and motivations/needs.
This section explains modern theories of collecting, interpretation, exhibit design, and visitor experience.
I. Collecting
At a fundamental level, museums are a repository for their artifact and archival collections. Museums acquire and preserve material because of their “potential values as examples, as reference material, or as objects of aesthetic or educational importance.”89
Collecting is a major undertaking at any museum. In larger museums, the curatorial crew employs an exhibits staff that includes a registrar (and in much larger museums, a team of registrars that keep track of different parts of the collections). The registrars are in charge of maintaining records of the collections and caring for, borrowing, and loaning artifacts.
The collections are interpreted and displayed for visitors, although the method of
89 G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1997), 14.
43 collecting has undergone a massive transformation when museum practices changed after
World War II.
The old way of thinking about collections and acquiring artifacts is represented in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) example from Chapter 2. As Jessie L. Embry and
Mauri Liljenquist Nelson explain, the DUP museum “resemble[d] the earliest museums, the ‘curiosity cabinets’ established during the Renaissance, where collectors displayed everything they had with little explanation.”90 Some museums still adopt this type of collecting and interpretation, but it is largely restricted to the smaller volunteer-staffed museums such as DUP and Fair Oaks. Small museums that display “accumulations of apparently miscellaneous items present much less cohesive— and coherent— narratives, but they do allow visitors to create a kind of order and understanding for themselves... the advantage of such collections is that they are less directive than more structured ones; the disadvantage is that uncritical visitors may never find an organizing principle to help them remember the site.”91 Although this was a trend before World War II, some early museum theorists rejected this type of collecting, such as librarian John Cotton Dana.
Dana, who lived from 1856-1929, did not believe that “simply to collect objects was to create a museum,” because acquiring objects was easy and merely formed a collection, but rather that “the worth of a museum... was in [a collection’s] use.”92
Most museum theorists mark the 1950s as a period of significant change among historical institutions. For many museums, the economic burden of large collections
90 Amy Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007), 161. 91 Ibid., 197. 92 Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002), 191.
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became a significant challenge and “their focus changed from an inward concentration on their collections to a newly articulated outward concentration on the various publics and communities that they served.”93 To best serve the public, museums have to use discretion when collecting and exhibiting artifacts. This doesn’t necessarily mean collecting less, but collecting with a more focused, specific intention that won’t visually or mentally overstimulate the visitor. G. Ellis Burcaw explains the new method among curatorial staff as selectivity, stating that “this was not only because teaching requires focusing on specific objects and specific associated ideas and the avoidance of distraction meanwhile, but also due to the recognition that anyone’s attention span and mental endurance are limited.”94 The shift to selectivity accommodates differing attention spans, but it also demonstrated the museum’s change in focus to a more integrated educational approach. Lisa Roberts explains that this type of collecting “reflects a shift in the language museums use to discuss their collections... this shift finds its roots in a wider revolution of thought about the nature and the production of knowledge.”95 Stephen Weil counters these theories with the claims that the majority of museums still operate as if the collections were still the main focus and objective of the museum, however.96
Today, collections are used by public historians and exhibit designers sparingly to teach a lesson. They are chosen based on their ability to best illustrate a story and help interpret a narrative. Burcaw believes that the “essential requirement in a good history museum is that objects must be collected to serve the purpose of public education,” and
93 Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002), 141-142. 94 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 125. 95 Lisa Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1997), 55. 96 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 41.
45 museum staff must keep this in mind rather than picking objects they believe the visitors will most likely want to see.97 Burcaw also gives eleven necessities for collecting in history museums: artifacts fitting within the museum’s scope, legal title to the artifacts, adequate documentation, assured safety and security, the ability to care for the artifacts, potential use, no duplication among artifacts, artifacts in good condition, a public relations structure that ensures the artifact’s visibility among the community, relevance to the museum’s collecting methods, and other special considerations such as humidity, light, and temperature control necessities.98 Before World War II, museums collected for the purpose of “mastery” of the subject and would display everything they owned. At present, most museums only display a fraction of their collections based on the space’s unique display/storage ratio, which is best decided by curators and exhibit designers.99
In fact, most museums have begun the politically treacherous process of deaccessioning and changing their collection policy to decline and get rid of gifts that are not accompanied by funds to endow for their future care.100 Items that should be eliminated from collections include those that are outside the scope of the museum, are not significant and cannot be used for research or loaning out to other museums, are damaged and deteriorated in a way that renders them useless, are better suited to the scope of a different museum, or are duplicated.101 An example of items that can be deaccessioned from the Fair Oaks Historical Society are a large collection of glass bottles
97 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 121. 98 Ibid., 64-65. 99 Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord, The Manual of Museum Management (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2001), 70. 100 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 143. 101 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 70.
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(see Appendix A Figure 2) in their “Fireside” gallery. The Historical Society’s collection is very large and cumbersome, and according to Burcaw’s deaccessioning prescription, all but one—two at the very most—should be discarded to free up valuable resources that can be spent otherwise on more valuable items. The problem, however, is that deaccessioning is a process that is often lengthy and involves many people, including the
Board, which can often be too removed from the specific internal operation of the museum and curatorial staff to fully understand why any historical artifacts should be deaccessioned. The process is political and often very lengthy, expending valuable non- profit staff energy. For these reasons, deaccessioning is often a very low priority to museum staff, and is only done infrequently when there is time and energy to be spent on such a difficult process.
Collecting has reflected the shift in museum studies in the later part of the twentieth century as museums have transformed from being about “something” to being for someone. While many smaller museums still adopt the old policies of collections management, the trend in recent years is to display only what best illustrates a story, and to only collect what is absolutely crucial to telling the stories that the museum wants to tell.
II. Interpretation
Lisa Roberts describes collections as the “vehicle, since an object’s presented meaning is ultimately shaped by decisions about its interpretation and display.”102
102 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 75.
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Interpretation is another critical element to the exhibit. Public historians are well acquainted with interpretation; it is also at the heart of their daily work. It is often the source of controversy, particularly when an interpretation challenges a coveted viewpoint. Interpretation is implied in exhibit design and research in professional museums; the term “exhibit” “carries the connotation that something has been added to the object or objects shown (interpretation) in order to accomplish something of importance (education, in the broad sense).”103 Exhibits are not just displays of objects, and the “interpretive act does not end with a decision about what an object shall say, because the arrival at that very decision entails a translation of particular objects and their contexts into language and hence meaning.”104 Interpretation is the exchange between the public historian in the museum and the visitor to the museum, when the historian presents her research in a narrative that is accessible to the public, and it is the historian’s best guess at what really happened in a particular moment in time; it is not complete, and there are other conclusions from people who are similarly qualified to render interpretations. Additionally, it is the historian implicitly asking the visitor to think about her research and make their own guesses based on their own unique backgrounds, heritage, and experiences. Interpretation is a two-way process. According to Serrell, it is the “communication between a knowledgeable guide and an interested listener, where the listener’s knowledge and meaning-making is as important as the guide’s.”105
103 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work,129. 104 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 75. 105 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 10.
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History museums often see themselves as having a “larger interpretive responsibility” than science museums (“where knowledge is ‘relatively certain”) and art museums (“where knowledge is a ‘matter of opinion’”).106 History is always contested, therefore history museums are responsible for presenting thoughtful interpretations that get the visitor to challenge their previously held notions and ideas about that particular event in human history. Amy Levin believes that historical presentations in the history museum need to present a theme that sets the agenda and recognizes that history “is more than just the facts.” It is the theme and conceptual frameworks that guide historians to choose particular facts and use them in certain ways.107 These themes and choices should always have the visitor’s meaning-making as the top priority. Roy Rosenzweig and David
Thelen explain that Americans put more trust in history museums and sites than in any other sources that explore the past, and respondents to their survey research indicated that museums gave visitors a “sense of immediacy” and personal participation that they associated with “eyewitnesses”; additionally, museums evoked the “intimacy of public gatherings” and “encouraged an interaction with primary sources that reminded respondents of independent research.”108 Interpretation is central to these experiences, and public historians working in museums strive to present their research in an interpretation that connects, inspires, and provokes visitors to enable this type of response.
106 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, xiii. 107 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 64. 108 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 105.
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Interpretation is a major source of contention as well when museums challenge deeply rooted, “patriotic,” or nostalgic narratives held by the public. A good example of the challenges to interpretation in museum exhibits is the 1995 display of the Enola Gay fuselage at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington,
DC. The museum staff designed an exhibit that featured the effects on the ground of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and questioned the decision to drop the bomb, which veterans groups and conservatives saw as an attack on a specific patriotic narrative that held that the bomb saved one hundred thousand American lives by preventing an invasion in
Japan. The display of the objects was an interpretive act that was largely unnoticed by these challengers, rather it was the textual interpretation that they rejected. The American
Legion’s Herman G. Harrington claimed that the American Legion believed “in passing a sense of America’s unique role in world history, and a sense of its greatness” and
NASM’s exhibit interpretation “consciously and intentionally violated every one of those principles by setting out to alter our citizens’ views of themselves.”109 The designers and curators ultimately scrapped the exhibit in favor of a less emotional, less interpretive, less evocative display.
The Enola Gay controversy also brings up the issue of museum censorship. Public historians often are forced to consider the fine line between provocative and offensive interpretation, and self-censorship—such as the Enola Gay example—can sometimes stifle important narratives. Smithsonian director of the National Museum of African
American History and Culture, Lonnie Bunch, encourages museum curators and exhibit
109 Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1996), page 62.
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designers to embrace controversy, warning that “the greatest danger [to museums] is not from threats to funding sources or pressures from government officials, but from the profession’s willingness to self-censor exhibitions, to smooth the rough edges of history, in order to not offend in this politically charged atmosphere.”110 The recent trend in museums is to embrace controversy, since “embracing controversy in exhibitions allows museums to expand and to alter their traditional role in American society.”111
In any type of exhibition or work of public history, controversial or not, interpretation guides the educational output and visitor experience. Interpretation among public historians is often referred to within the framework of Freeman Tilden’s six principles of interpretation. Tilden’s landmark work for public historians, Interpreting
Our Heritage, explains that when he once approached an archaeological site, he was given a story that “had been interpreted for me; seemingly unrelated facts had been reasoned into a whole picture that solved all difficulties.”112 Tilden exemplifies the approach of interpretation that weaves data into a meaningful narrative that is effortless for the untrained visitor to understand. He also claims that “interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact.”113 His six principles of interpretation help guide public historians to mimic this effortless narrative he experienced at the site; they are:
110 Lonnie Bunch, “Embracing Controversy: Museum Exhibitions and the Politics of Change.” The Public Historian 14, no. 3 (Summer 1992), 64. 111 Ibid., 65. 112 Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 33. 113 Ibid., 33.
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1. Any interpretation that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor will be sterile. 2. Information, as such, is not interpretation. Interpretation is revelation based upon information. But they are entirely different things. However, all interpretation includes information. 3. Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical, or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable. 4. The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation. 5. Interpretation should aim to present a whole rather than a part and must address itself to the whole man rather than any phase. 6. Interpretation addressed to children (say, up to the age of twelve) should not be a dilution of the presentations to adults- but should follow a fundamentally different approach. To be at its best it will require a separate program.114
The most important of Tilden’s principles in museum exhibit design is the second principle; that information is not interpretation, but that interpretation is a “revelation” based on information. This principle was a major guide in my label development in Fair
Oaks, and guides most historians in their interpretive displays. While creating a narrative, it was crucial for me to think beyond the facts I was presenting and to offer a deeper meaning that the visitor could connect to personally.
One visitor paradigm regarding interpretation commonly used today is called the
“baby bird” model, which “sees the visitor as a relatively undeveloped appetite needing our wise and learned feeding... the staff expects to provide these visitors with motivation and with learning experiences.”115 This type of interpretive model is current, yet seems in danger of reverting to the old ways of thinking when museum staff viewed the institution introspectively, in terms of its “mastery” in a particular subject and what it could teach the visitors. This model still gives the visitors (the baby birds) the chance to think about it
114 Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 34-35. 115 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 213.
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and figuratively “digest” the information, but it also implies that the museum (the mother bird) is forcing it down their beaks. Nevertheless, this interpretive model is still used, although rarely given too much weight among other interpretive theories and models used by large museums.
One final interpretive model for historians in museums is the “thick and thin” model for interpretation. Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz differentiated between thin interpretation, which is descriptive in its text, and thick interpretation, which “goes beyond description to discover the symbolic meaning of an act or an object within a culture.”116 There are certainly ways to employ both thick and thin methods of interpretation in a history museum, and although the thick interpretation model is most desired among public historians, there are instances where thin interpretation might be a better option, for example, in captions for photographs, or label text that responds to a piece of art. In these instances, it would be better to include a description rather than interpret, since photographs should only have short captions less than fifty words, and since many visitors might rather interpret pieces of art for themselves.
Interpretation is central to the public historian’s work. In the museum, the interpretive work is presented to visitors in a way that allows them to make their own meaningful associations, allowing for the fact that there are many interpretations and no single narrative is correct. A museum’s collecting practices and interpretive model guide the exhibit designer’s work, which is the main vehicle that drives the messages to the
116 Thomas Woods, “Getting Beyond the Criticism of History Museums: A Model for Interpretation.” The Public Historian 12, no. 3 (Summer 1990), 83.
53 wider public. In the next section, I will outline the most important principles of exhibit design.
III. Exhibit Design
Exhibits are the main way visitors encounter collections and narratives. They are also the evidence regarding the “manifold decisions regarding artifact choice, setting, and interpretation.”117 Exhibit design is the creative aspect of education and collection management in museums. It consists of labels that contain interpretive text and the creative display of collections, both used in a way that best tells the story the museum is trying to tell. Before creating a design plan, there are a few main details that are important to keep in mind at all stage of the designing process. First, it is important to remember that on average, visitors only stop at 20-40% of the exhibit elements within an exhibition.118 Additionally, about 60% of a visitor’s attention over the entire museum visit is spent looking at exhibits, and the peak amount of content focus occurred in the first fifteen minutes of the visit.119 Finally, the average stay time in an exhibit is one minute for every three hundred feet.120 It is crucial to make those brief encounters engaging, interactive, and meaningful in order to help the visitor maximize their museum experience. The designer must be deliberative about the amount of content and limit it to ensure the visitor is not overwhelmed and that the visit does not take all day.
117 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 8-9. 118 John Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009), 98-99. 119 Ibid., 25. 120 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 71.
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In addition to creating a realistic time frame, the exhibit designers must also decide beforehand how they want to present the information and narratives. One common method is the idea of “layering” or “leveling” information, which Serrell describes as a way to connect with different learning styles and different complexities among visitors.
Layering information also refers to giving the visitor the choice to read parts of the labels or look at parts of the displays without feeling like they are missing out if they do not read further, and that every layer of information is clearly marked (by color, font, style, or size) and the visitor can choose to read further information if they are inclined to do so.
All public historians designing exhibits must keep in mind Serrell’s thirteen characteristics of ideal exhibitions: it must make the subject come to life; it must get the message across quickly; the visitor can understand the points it is making quickly; there is something in it for all ages; it is noticeable; it allows the visitor to test themselves to see if they are right; it involves each visitor; it deals with the subjects better than textbooks; the information is clearly presented; it makes a difficult subject easier; it gives just enough information; it is clear what the visitor is supposed to do and how to begin; and the visitor’s attention is not distracted from it by other displays.121 Similarly, it must be memorable. It must be an experience that involves the visitor’s senses and in which the visitor is gently guided to make discoveries. It should be a personal experience, and the visitor should have plenty of opportunities to investigate and make observations.122
Ideal exhibits are ones that are easy to understand and includes all visitors of all learning types and comprehension levels, and importantly, the visitors can walk away knowing
121 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 46-47. 122 Ibid., 47.
55 exactly what they were supposed to think about and learn, and can relay that information to others.
To begin the design process, the exhibit crew and curators need to decide on a
“Big Idea” that will “clarify, limit, and focus the nature and scope of an exhibition and provide a well-defined goal against which to rate its success.”123 The Big Idea can be as short as a few words— for example, it may even be the title of the exhibition itself—and as detailed as one or two sentences but it should not be longer than two sentences. It should not be “vague or compound;” a Big Idea is big “because it has fundamental meaningfulness that is important to human nature.”124 The Big Idea should have an
“unambiguous focus” that will guide the exhibit team throughout the development process, but it should not be set in stone.125 The Big Idea should limit the scope of the exhibit but also allow for some flexibility along the way; it is the thesis statement of the exhibition. Once the exhibit team has a Big Idea that will focus their research, design, artifact choice, and label creation, the team is able to begin designing.
The first step in exhibit creation is usually the label writing, which comes from the research and resulting interpretations. Labels are the most important form of interpretation in an exhibit. Every label has a specific purpose for the exhibit and every label must be clear and easy to understand separate from the rest of the labels, which can be achieved by randomly testing labels among staff members and designers. Labels must clearly outline the structure and organization of the exhibits, since visitors who have a
123 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 1. 124 Ibid., 2. 125 Ibid., 5-6.
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clear idea about the organization of the exhibit and use it in the intended sequence “spend more time and get more out of it.”126
The exhibit designer must establish an exhibit voice in labels, a crucial choice that requires significant maneuvering to avoid sounding authoritative on one end or condescending on the other end. One recent trend in exhibit voice is allowing participants in the event at hand to guide the exhibit through first-person narratives. The trend in offering first-person participant voice is a result from the “culture wars” from the 1990s, and many visitors now view this voice as impartial and acceptable.127 Whatever voice is considered, it can often cause tension among museum staff. Lisa Roberts claims that the museum educators, not the exhibit designers, are the most sensitive to the voice of the exhibit messages.128 On the other hand, Stephen Weil indicates that the label voice is in the hands of the exhibit crew and curators, who he advises to “[tone] down... that omniscient and impersonal voice” from the “museum of yesteryear.”129 Most theorists agree that the best voice is informal, simple, short, and direct, which is proven to engage visitors in behaviors such as “reading aloud, pointing to objects, and sharing information.”130 The voice of the labels, which is the voice of the exhibition, has a major impact on visitor experience and should be decided upon early in the process—ideally, after the Big Idea is decided, and the exhibit crew has the clearest objective for the exhibit.
126 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 23. 127 Peter Liebhold, “Experiences from the Front Line: Presenting a Controversial Exhibition During the Culture Wars.” The Public Historian 22, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 74. 128 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 55. 129 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 208. 130 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, 67.
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Serrell describes four types of exhibit labels in history exhibits.131 The title/subtitle exhibit label is the largest and most attention-grabbing label of the exhibit. It is typically no more than one to seven words. The introductory label is used sparingly, but it is typically at the beginning of each exhibit and outlines what the visitor can expect to learn about if they follow the exhibit sequence. It is typically twenty to 300 words. The secondary labels, also known as group or section labels, interpret a collection of information, photographs, objects, or pieces of the narrative. They are typically twenty to
150 words long. Finally, captions are the most descriptive labels, individually interpreting each photograph or object as it relates to the larger story. Captions are usually no longer than 150 words maximum, and usually the best captions are no longer than fifty words long. When writing these labels, designers typically do not write below a sixth-grade level or above an eighth-grade level.132 Additionally, sentences in all label types should average between twelve and fifteen words, and there should be around 130 to 150 syllables per 100 words.133 The font size is frequently an issue for exhibit designers, who do not want to aesthetically overwhelm the visitors but must keep in mind what type might look like to someone who is visually impaired, or in the instance that there may be large groups in front of a particular exhibit element and people in the back might not be able to see very well. For most people, eighteen-point font is the minimum size of body copy, and the text should be comfortably legible at twenty inches away from a standing reader with good lighting.134 Labels that are printed seem more authoritative,
131 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 33. 132 Ibid., 97. 133 Ibid., 200. 134 Ibid., 197.
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and labels that are printed using modern graphic design software are visually pleasing to most visitors. Amy Levin contrasts the modern label theory to the label methods at small museums as “meticulously hand-written index cards characteristic of a nineteenth- century collection” that “may seem charming today, but the public finds computer- generated labels more professional.”135
Even if the exhibit designer follows these prescriptions for good label design, the designer still must aim for writing visitor-friendly content. Serrell also advises that these designers start with information that is directly related to what visitors can see, feel, do, smell, or experience from where they are standing. They should also vary the length of sentences, use short paragraphs and metaphors, avoid alliteration, use exclamation marks to force emphasis, use humor sparingly, only use quotations when they advance the narrative, include informative paragraph titles and subtitles, and have a snappy ending.136
Serrell also advises not to use “newspaper journalism” and to make sure that the labels are starting a conversation. In general, a label should make the vocabulary appropriate for all ages, and use bullet points to make it easier to read. They should not make generalizations among individual objects, and they should be in a visible location so that people of all heights and people in wheelchairs can read them.137 The most important idea is that this is an exhibit, not an encyclopedia; visitors are there to experience, not to read.138
135 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 13. 136 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 84-91. 137 Ibid.,, 27. 138 Ibid., 125.
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After the labels are outlined and written, the exhibit design team must decide on a method to display the artifacts creatively and in a way that best tells the story. Burcaw describes four approaches to displaying artifacts. The first approach, the open storage approach, consists of displaying objects immediately with little or no organization and spotty or absent labeling.139 The second approach is the object approach, where there are some items on display and some labels accompanying them, but no real intellectual motive or Big Idea.140 This was the type of display method that was employed by the
Fair Oaks Historical Society in their “Fireside” room, and one characteristic of small museums and local galleries. The third method is the idea approach, when planners decide the storyline first, then decide how to best present it and select the objects that best tell it. The risk of such an approach is de-emphasizing the objects by focusing more on the narrative.141 The last approach, the combined approach, would have been available to us if this were the case. This approach calls for designers to select objects and ideas at the same time based on the significance of the objects and the purpose of the museum.142
This is the ideal method of artifact display.
Finally, one last consideration of the designer is whether or not to include interactive displays within an exhibit. Interactives engage the senses of the individual, allowing them to hear, see, feel, or smell the objects that are presented. In history museums, this can be a film, an audio dome that visitors can stand underneath and hear audio snippets from oral histories, or any kind of interactive involving a monitor that they
139 Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 133. 140 Ibid., 133. 141 Ibid., 134. 142 Ibid., 134.
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can manipulate to test their knowledge or discover more; the options for interactive displays are limitless. Science museums and children’s museums are often filled with interactive exhibits. Serrell explains what seems intuitively true among visitors: that children are more likely to use interactive than adults, but adults are more likely to read labels than children.143 Roberts warns of one of designers’ and educators’ greatest frustration with interactives, stating that some people are subject to the ‘pinball effect’ where “visitors have been observed moving around haphazardly, pushing buttons and pulling levers, enjoying the effects but making no effort to understand them.”144 The problem with relying on interactives in history museums is that the historical storyline is chronological, sequenced, and thematic and features narratives that require more floorspace than a small interactive that would be more effective teaching a short lesson, as in science museums. She also warns that although interactive communications media were developed to “supplement and interpret collections and to extend visitor’s experience, many have now become so sophisticated and interesting as to overshadow the objects they were designed to set off.”145
One revolutionary idea about interactive elements in museums is introduced in
Nina Simon’s recent work, The Participatory Museum. Simon discusses a new institution where the museum “supports multidirectional content experiences” and serves as a platform that connects visitors who “act as content creators, distributors, consumers, critics, and collaborators.”146 She outlines ideas for participatory elements in museums
143 Serrell, Exhibit Labels: an Interpretive Approach, 38. 144 Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum,18. 145 Ibid., 86. 146 Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, USA.: Museum 2.0, 2010), 2.
61 where visitors can add to the content of the museums and the museums can display that information. One example she gives is a library that developed a type of “tagging system” when patrons return books. If they wish to classify the book as a certain genre or with certain content, they can drop it down a specific book return chute where it is catalogued with that user “tag.” Then, when patrons wish to read a book with a certain tag, they are able to decide based on the tags that other users have given it. It is entirely a user-generated tagging system that benefits other users, and the library serves as merely the platform.147 This type of participatory experience would serve public historians well, who aim to make history accessible to all, and incorporate other narratives into their work to create the most well-rounded historiography of a time period, event, person, place, or theme.
Participatory exhibits must be designed extremely well and with extreme caution to be effective. First, they must have boundaries and constraints and not feature entirely open-ended opportunities for self expression.148 Most people do well with constraints and are more likely to participate if they know how long they will be at the particular exhibit element. Second, in order to get people to collaborate confidently with strangers,
“participants need to engage through personal, not social, entry points.”149 This means the individual must begin the participatory process by logging their own data that can be aggregated and shared among social groups, rather than starting the visitor in a group. In successful participatory exhibit elements, “visitors don’t build exhibits from scratch or
147 Simon, The Participatory Museum, 7. 148 Ibid., 22. 149 Ibid., 22.
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design their own science experiments... instead, they participate in larger projects: joining the team, doing their part.”150
The remainder of Simon’s work in The Participatory Museum is mostly focused on helping museums attain her “me-to-we” design model of participation. The “me-to- we” model has five stages.151 Stage one is the stage where the individual consumes content; in history museums, this is often where the design ends. Stage two is when the individual interacts with the content, which can be applied in history museums but more frequently happens in science and children’s museums. Stage three is when the individual interactions are aggregated. For example, an interactive display might ask a question to a visitor and have them choose their response. The responses might be aggregated on a larger screen above the interactive station that shows what other people have answered.
Successful participatory exhibits can end at this stage in the model, and can “lay the groundwork for support and encourage unfacilitated social experiences.”152 The fourth stage is when the individual interactions are networked for social use; a good example of this type of interaction is a video arcade game, when high scores are displayed at the end of the game and the individual interacts with this information by trying to beat the high scores and adding their own. This is more difficult to attain in a museum setting because most visitors would rather interact with content individually than in groups, but as soon as individuals can witness other people generating their own content, they can use that content for social purposes. Finally, the fifth stage is when individuals engage with each
150 Simon, The Participatory Museum, 23. 151 Ibid., 26. 152 Ibid., 27.
63 other socially after using the other content for social purposes, for example, if there is a type of interactive display that prompts people to work in groups to generate content but can start as an individual endeavor, such as a trivia game or art project. Simon’s work is revolutionary in exhibit design because it takes the idea of interactive elements—as well as public programming and museum education—to a groundbreaking new level. It is not enough to merely offer aesthetically interesting exhibits, and it is not even enough to offer interactives, which were previously thought as groundbreaking innovations on the museum frontier; Simon pushes museum staff to engage their audiences in new ways that are concurrent with new uses of social media. Public historians in historic sites and living history sites can also take heed from Simon’s work, and it is surely stirring up the debate among cultural institutions who are trying to keep current with the trends in social interaction and communication.
These design theories are generally accepted as modern and successful, mostly because they are visitor-centric. They focus on making the visitor experience enjoyable and easy, and they reflect a larger trend in identifying the different audiences that make up museum visitors. Text that is layered will help the visitors who come with children and have less time to read lengthy labels; interactives appeal to most types of visitors, and a creative and diverse artifact display of pottery, for example, can create a positive experience for a pottery enthusiast or historian. Modern exhibit design is heavily influenced by studying the types of visitors that come to museums, and in the next section, I will briefly outline these typologies and their importance in the overall design process.
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IV. Visitor Experience
The changes that museums experienced after World War II focused so much on visitor experience that an entire new field of study emerged with the groundbreaking work of John H. Falk. Falk postulates that museums, as institutions that provide leisure and thus have to compete with the other entertainment venues such as movie theaters, must tirelessly study visitors, find out what motivates them to come to the museum, discover their unique identities, and cater to those motivations and identities to ensure that they return and tell their friends and family to return. Ultimately the goal is not money, but to provide a worthwhile experience and ensure that visitors feel that they can return and repeat that experience again. Central to this idea is that much of the visitor experience is made up of events that happen long before the visitor even sets foot inside the museum.
Falk puts forth the Museum Visitor Experience Model, a stochastic model that assumes that “initial states,” or the motivations and needs of the visitors that determine why they visit the museum based on prior knowledge of the subject matter and the museum’s offerings, are the most important thing in understanding how visitors experience exhibits and museums.153 People have certain motivations that drive them to visit a museum. For some, it may be that their partner brought them along, or if there is something particular they want to see, or if they are visiting from out of town and believe the museum to be a central tourist stop and an important cultural landmark that they want
153 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 101.
65 to be able to say they have visited. These motivations form “identities” that differentiate museum visitors and enable museum staff, exhibit designers, and visitor services managers to determine how they should market, collect, design, educate, and conduct outreach. Falk describes five central visitor identities that encompass almost all of the motivations for visiting a museum and make up the visitor trajectories and expected experiences.
The first identity is Explorer. The Explorer is the visitor that comes to the museum “seeking to satisfy their personal interests and curiosities.”154 Explorers usually appreciate the value of interpretive tools such as audio guides and docent tours, but typically shy away from these activities because they believe they are too structured and will prevent, not assist, their exploratory learning.155 These visitors do not like authoritative exhibit voices and typically respond well to layered interpretation; additionally, they do not mind reading label text if it is mentally stimulating. For an
Explorer, an exhibit designer might ask introspective questions in exhibit labels, such as the “what would you do?” or “what do you think?” varieties of questions. The important thing a designer should keep in mind in writing these introspective labels is to avoid being too simplistic, which could feel authoritative to an Explorer. Also, the museum would be well suited to include a diverse and interesting gift shop, since Explorers are also the most likely to peruse it at the end of their visit.156
154 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 217. 155 Ibid., 218. 156 Ibid., 221.
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The second identity is Facilitator, which is the museum visitor who is there because someone brought them or they are bringing someone else. The largest population of Facilitators are parents who join their children on field trips or bring their families on weekends. Facilitators are there because they have a “strong desire to support what’s best for their loved one or companion.”157 For many of these people, the experience of whoever they are accompanying is more important to them than their own experience.
Exhibit designers can accommodate Facilitators by designing exhibits with large signs that are easy to see and direct people in a particular way, since many of them are accompanying small children.158 When designing labels, exhibit designers must make the label text easy to interpret for children if parents are reading them. Additionally, important information and interpretation relating to the Big Idea should be placed regularly throughout the exhibit so that Facilitating parents can truly grasp what they are supposed to take away from their visit. Finally, a friendly floor staff can help guide these individuals and make the facilitating experience smooth and efficient.159
The third visitor identity is Experience Seeker. The Experience Seeker is there to have a good experience, which usually consists of them leaving “feeling like they’ve seen and done what’s important to see and do,” for example, when tourists in Paris visit the
Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. Experience Seekers are often the ones who want to be told what to see and what to do and leave much of their experience in the hands of the museum staff. Creating a “Guide to the Museum’s Best” pamphlet or highlight tour
157 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 222. 158 Ibid., 222. 159 Ibid., 223.
67 would aid in making these experiences good ones, especially at large museums and art museums.160 Additionally, explaining why these highlights are important parts of history work well for these types of visitors. Front line staff can ask questions upon admission such as, “Is there something specific you’ve come to see today?” Special signage and exhibit labels can accompany the major artifacts or pieces of art and point out why they are important. Since these visitors are often tourists, it is important to have accessible amenities such as bathrooms, coat checks (if necessary), and dining options.161 Front line staff should be knowledgeable about the surrounding area to direct these visitors to their next destinations; it might also be helpful to have a partnership with a taxi company or other services that enable the visitor to have a smooth and enjoyable experience that allows them to focus on the museum’s content rather than where their car is parked or how they will get back to their hotel.
The fourth type of visitor identity is Professional/Hobbyist. The
Professional/Hobbyist is the visitor that comes with a specific experience in mind. They typically come to see a specific artifact, exhibit, artist, or whatever is on display. They usually have a background, whether professional or amateur, in what is on display and usually do not spend much time in the other exhibits or exploring the other parts of the museum that do not represent their unique interest. For example, a toy train collector might visit a large railroad museum if the museum mounts an exhibition on model trains from the 1950s, or a vintage auto enthusiast might visit the Sacramento Auto Museum and particular exhibits that feature their favorite type of vintage car. These types of
160 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 225. 161 Ibid., 226.
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visitors do not mind the old model of artifact display (or Burcaw’s open storage approach) and might even prefer the type of open, easy access to the artifact that this type of artifact display offers.162 Museum staff can create special behind-the-scenes tours for these visitors and can pair up with local hobby groups to schedule and design experiences in the museum, as well as public programming and educational opportunities.163 Museum staff can provide these visitors with good maps, orientation signage, and knowledgeable floor staff that can guide them to areas of the museum they might want to see.164
The final visitor identity is the Recharger, who visits the museum to relax in a
“peaceful and aesthetically pleasing corner of the world.”165 Previously called Spiritual
Pilgrims, Rechargers come to the museum to “recharge their batteries,” and they often go to art museums and botanical gardens instead of history museums. Falk claims that
Rechargers are the easiest to please because they make few demands on the institution, but it would serve these visitors well to place lots of benches in the galleries/gardens/exhibit halls in beautiful and low-traffic places.166 They are usually repeat visitors and do not typically attend lectures, concerts, or other public programming that the museum offers and do not usually visit the museum store or cafe.167 They do not
162 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 228. 163 Ibid., 228-229. 164 Ibid., 229. 165 Ibid., 230. 166 Ibid., 230. 167 Ibid., 230.
69 require extensive label text, signage, or guides and maps because “what they’re seeking is not typically put on the map.”168
Falk puts forth these identities because he believes museums cannot afford to overlook them in their operation and exhibit design. Falk believes that these identities show that visitors interact with the exhibits and the museum in predictable ways, and the visitor is affected by a whole series of additional factors, many of which are under the control of the institution.169 Museums not only need to market experiences to these visitor identities, but they also need to ensure that the different needs of each identity are met.
Additionally, the identity of the visitor can change during the course of the visit, as Falk explains:
Identity emerges as something that is malleable and continually constructed by the individual as need requires. Thus, our identity can be constructed by the individual as need requires. Thus, our identity can be defined as something that is always “situated” in the immediate realities of the physical and socio-cultural world. Our identity is a reflection and reaction to both the social and physical world we consciously perceive in the moment, but identity is also influenced by the vast unconscious set of familial, cultural, and personal history influences each of us carries within us. Each is continuously constructing and maintaining, not one, but numerous identities which are expressed collectively or individually at different times, depending upon need and circumstance. From this perspective, identity is emergent, rather than permanent; it is something nimble, ever- changing, and adaptive.170
Ultimately, if the museum can provide for these different motivations, needs, and identities, visitors will return and encourage others to visit. More importantly, the museum can meet its educational goals, its purpose, and can expand its role in the community. Falk’s work has transformed the field of museum studies, as many exhibit
168 Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, 230. 169 Ibid., 176. 170 Ibid., 72-73.
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designers now consciously incorporate the visitor identities and the Museum Visitor
Experience Model into their plans. Educators, marketers, and administrators also benefit heavily from keeping these identities in mind when conducting their individual work for the museum. Visitor experience will fortunately play a large role in the future of history museums.
V. Conclusion
History museums have a unique role in local culture. They are educational institutions by design but they also are places where people can explore their own heritage and backgrounds, perhaps even without the facilitation of curatorial interpretation. They are places that many people trust to present fair, balanced narratives, but they are also places that are subject to controversy and imposed censorship. Because of these unique circumstances, exhibit design for these museums is precarious and needs to adhere to the current standards to ensure positive visitor experiences. Collecting should reflect the post World War II museology that places quality over quantity, and interpretation should be more informal and less imposing than in the museums of the past. Exhibits should be clear and professional, should allow for different types of learners and visitors, and should be concise and simple rather than long and complicated.
Finally, visitor experiences should be at the center of collecting, interpretation, and exhibit design to ensure that the museum’s purpose is clear and understandable. These ideals fit neatly in the field of public history, which makes history more relatable and accessible to the public.
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CHAPTER 4
HISTORY GALLERY PROJECT: PLANNING
The Fair Oaks Historical Society’s History Gallery project is a good case study for public historians working in local historical societies. Historical societies are often comprised of passionate amateur historians who typically volunteer their time and expertise. They are celebratory of their past, particularly of the community’s founding families and the successes that shaped the community through the decades. According to public historian Carol Kammen, local history tends to “democratize the possibility of heroism: that is, to see heroism in Everyman, or at least in every citizen of the community
(excluding, of course, blacks, transients, women, and people whose position was marginal).”171 Public historians who encounter this scenario as consultants may be alarmed by the lack of controversy and diversity within their clients’ stories. Yet because they rely so heavily on volunteer time, money, and energy and they harbor such deep devotion to preservation, “what exists is as likely to be a product of limited resources as of a conscious, coherent vision of the past... features that scholars interpret as representing ideological positions might actually be the result of making do with what is available.”172 The lack of formal training and resources make research and interpretation frustratingly difficult within these groups; this is not the fault of historical societies, but rather of the economic, political, and cultural climates. This is a reality that public
171 Carol Kammen, On Doing Local History: Reflections on What Local Historians Do, Why, and What It Means (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1995), 17. 172Amy Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007), 106.
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historians working as consultants for local historical societies must consider at all stages of their projects.
With this understanding, public historians in local history museum projects such as the Fair Oaks History Gallery project must also make difficult decisions regarding two separate spheres of thought: the narratives that so many residents (the clients) hold dear, stitched together over years of limited resources, and the professional necessity to confront other viewpoints that may challenge visitors’ (and members’) conception of history itself.173 The challenge to the public historian in this context is to develop the means to reach diverse audiences and exhibits that are reflective of the growing grassroots history movement, while also delivering a narrative that reflects the values and visions of the client.174 The History Gallery project presented me with an opportunity to experience this tension. The project exemplifies the strain between professional history consultants, devoted to inclusivity and accuracy, and the Historical Society, with an equally intense devotion to preserving and celebrating their ancestors’ stories. This chapter covers the first weeks of the project and the steps I took to plan the two exhibits for the new history museum and my introduction to this professional challenge.
In the summer of 2011, Larry Bishop approached me about a new project on which he was hired as a consultant. He was engaged to help plan and design the new
“History Gallery” for the Fair Oaks Historical Society. He asked for my help with the project, as I had expressed an interest in getting into the museum field of public history.
173 Jo Blatti, Past Meets Present: Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audiences (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1987), 135. 174 Barbara Howe and Emory Kemp, Public History: An Introduction (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, Inc, 1986), 242.
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By October, we had a full-fledged plan in motion. I was introduced to the president of the
Historical Society and the webmaster and member in charge of the archival collection. In
July, Bishop presented the president with a proposal for the project that outlined its development in three phases: graphic design based on the Big Idea (part of Beverly
Serrell’s design principles); text writing based on the client’s desired content; and artifact handling (see Appendix B). Also included in the packet was Serrell’s first chapter on the
Big Idea and a worksheet to prompt the clients to consider their Big Idea and identify their audience.
Bishop expressed to me at the beginning of this project that there had already been a series of disagreements between the Board members and outside historians. Years prior to my work for the Historical Society, another Public History graduate student wrote a manuscript for an Arcadia book on the history of Fair Oaks and was met with some disfavor, with a few members believing that he had “altered” the local historical canon that was put forth by the Historical Society’s revered historian. This graduate student’s work was seen as unfairly biased and not compatible with the history their resident historian narrated. With this situation in mind, Bishop and I knew we might experience some resistance and it was the beginning of what seemed to be an ongoing series of disagreements between us and the Board.
Bishop scheduled a meeting with the president and photo archivist at the end of
October 2011 which I was unable to attend. Immediately afterwards, Bishop emailed me and described the overall feeling of the meeting. It was evident that we would have to present the Fair Oaks Historical Society their history as they saw it. Additionally, some
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members of the Historical Society advised him that they interpreted the history of their community beginning with the European colonization in 1895, which left out the narrative of the Maidu, the original inhabitants. Historian Jay Price explained this phenomenon in local history settings, when “uncomfortable controversies, inequalities, and conflicts are ignored, while historic figures become heroes, and earlier times start looking like the ‘good old days’.”175 In this case, the story of the Maidu might not have been consciously ignored, but just left out in favor of the stories with which the members were familiar; again, with limited resources, it is likely that the members might have been unaware how to include these narratives in a way that is consistent with their vision of their history. Bishop assured them that we were trained to present other stories and would be able to include the Maidu story without distorting the history they wanted to tell.
This meeting also solidified an opening date for the first weekend in May 2012, during the community’s “Fiesta Days” weekend. Bishop, the president of the Historical
Society, and I agreed to include a temporary exhibit about water, the history of the Fair
Oaks water system, and the role water played in the town’s development as an agricultural area as well as a permanent exhibit that would tell the “entire” Fair Oaks story. Historical Society representatives were to provide us with the text, artifacts, and images they wanted to use, and the next meeting was set for November 12th. We were provided with a source list of their library and archival collections that they thought might be helpful in my research. On November 12th, Bishop and I met and discussed our roles in the project and our first steps. I was assigned the task of research. My first task
175 Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities, 99.
75 was to look through the photograph collections, but because they were under the ownership of an individual member and not the Historical Society, I was instead required to ask for specific photos from this individual, even though I had not seen any of them prior to reviewing their content on the spreadsheet. Although we attempted to explain that we were trained in proper storage, handling, and preservation of photographs, we were not allowed to hold onto the original copies.
At this point early in the planning process, the president emailed Bishop and me a list of concerns and comments he received from the Board members. From the email, it was evident that again, the members were very concerned that we might distort their story as they believed had happened with the previous graduate student, and they were interested in managing the development and design process at every step. We were informed that the Board wanted approximately two-thirds of the floor space to be devoted to the temporary exhibit and one-third reserved for a general overview of Fair Oaks, although we previously explained the importance of a larger temporary exhibit to generate more public involvement. The president also explained that the Board wanted the temporary exhibit on water to be exhibited for a year and then moved to the Fair Oaks
Water District offices. Some members also wanted to direct us toward research specific resources within their collections and amongst their colleagues, who had specialized knowledge of different aspects of Fair Oaks’ history such as the first schools, dredging, bridges, and other topics. I realized that this project was more than exhibit design, I was to assemble a large volume of in-depth research for them, and I was required to visit
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individual members’ houses and conduct additional oral histories for them which we had not initially planned as part of our project proposal and agreement.
In early December of 2011, the photo archivist emailed an excel spreadsheet with the inventory of the Society’s photographs and artifacts. Many of them did not have dates. As historians, we felt it was unprofessional to consider exhibiting photographs that did not have at least a “circa” date. Bishop inquired via email if the photo archivist knew of any of the dates for this collection. A revised spreadsheet was quickly sent back to us, and we noticed that many of the previously empty spaces now included dates (circa decades). Because it was such a fast turn-around time, we privately questioned the veracity of the dates he provided. Additionally, we also wondered if we unintentionally threatened his position as the manager of the archival collections by pointing out the historical fallacy of missing dates in the photographs. The photo archivist was accidentally included in private response that reflected these beliefs, and he subsequently resigned his post as the director of the newsletter and webmaster. The Board was included in his resignation email, marking the end of their professional relationship with
Bishop. The president did his best to resolve the issue, but from that point on, the archivist’s relationship—and the relationship of the Board members—with Bishop in particular was compromised. Because I was not the author of the email in question, I was allowed to continue on the project. Thus, at this very nascent development stage, I took on the principal role in the development of the exhibits and the communication with the
Board.
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The planning stage of the project exhibited some of the characteristics that were defined by Amy Levin, Carol Kammen, and Stephen Weil. It was clear that we were working with a knowledgeable and concerned group of individuals who were passionate about their local heritage and were aware that they needed to hire consultants to deliver the best product. It was also evident that they were hesitant to relinquish control of their story to people they did not know and did not trust. We began the project with the understanding that gaining and keeping the Board’s trust would be challenging, but we worked diligently to ensure that we remained professional and gave them a product worthy of their trust that justly portrayed their pride in their heritage.
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CHAPTER 5
HISTORY GALLERY PROJECT: DESIGN AND FABRICATION
When the design process began in December, Bishop’s role was to offer advice and help me carry out the practical aspects of design and execution, such as finding a printer and deciding which type of gatorboard to use for our panels. Additionally, Bishop helped me navigate the software we used to design the three-dimensional gallery views and the panels. My role changed dramatically at the beginning of the design stage. I became the “face” to the project; I was the person that members and Board members approached with criticism or questions. I was to conduct the research, write the text, choose the photographs and artifacts, and hold any presentations that were required by the Board members. The project was largely in my hands and Bishop helped me when I needed guidance.
In mid-December, Bishop developed a concept for a four-sided frame that would hold four panels, each two feet wide and four feet tall that would guide our label and textual design. These panels would be transferrable and could move from the wall to the frames or vice versa; additionally, these frames could be easily transported to the Fair
Oaks Water District once the water exhibit was moved to that location. It would also be easy to create new panels of a uniform size that can be switched out when a new exhibit was later designed (see Appendix C Figures 1-2). Bishop described it as such:
Each frame can hold four graphic panels and be placed anywhere on the open floor or, if necessary they can be used three-sided with the "empty" side placed against or near to a wall. They can be relocated to their next venue or, if floor space is unavailable, the graphics can be easily removed and hung on walls. I think this will give us the flexibility to adapt the exhibits to whatever venue they
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will inhabit after finishing their run at the History Center. The graphic panels are 2ft x 4ft and the the frames are 6ft tall. This places the content at a convenient eye-level for most visitors. Four display panels can be cut from a single 4ft x 8ft sheet of foam board without any waste. The graphics can be direct-printed to the foam board, or printed first and then dry or wet mounted to the board. Ideally, the frames would be made from a clear hardwood, but this is a budget issue. A cabinet grade fir may work.
Simultaneously, we had arranged a meeting with the president and photo archivist to decide the exhibit titles and the Big Idea that would guide our work. In the earlier planning stage, we had discussed concept ideas and expectations on both sides, but we had yet to determine a Big Idea. We arranged a meeting for January 2nd, 2012, for this purpose. Five days before the meeting, the president opened the meeting to all Board members, which turned the meeting from a design meeting to an extension of the planning stage. The president described this meeting as a chance for the Board to
“discuss their concerns about project theme content and development process” and additionally to “clarify what the Board wants regarding story lines and content approval.”
He also added in the invitation that the photo archivist advised him that the photo collection was “quite extensive” and the photographs may require interpretation on our part. The photo archivist wanted us to draft the story lines, and he would identify the appropriate photographs for the storyline. Initially, Bishop and I wanted to explain that as historians we are ethically bound to present history without distorting the truth, but that we were also devoted as contractors to telling the stories they approved. We sent an email explaining that we were looking forward to the meeting and opening a dialogue with the
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Board, and agreed to assure them that we were happy to accommodate the suggestions and requests as they fit into our development of the project.
The meeting on January 2nd was much more productive than we had anticipated.
We considered a Big Idea for both exhibits, and kept coming back to the idea of
California as a “dream,” focusing on the draw and pull to California and Fair Oaks from drearier places. We discussed the charming features of Fair Oaks— the proximity to the river, the oaks, the lush terrain— and that Fair Oaks provided a backdrop for settlers from the east to realize that “dream.” We settled on titles for the Big Ideas. For the permanent exhibit, we decided on “Fair Oaks: “Traces of the Past”” and for the temporary exhibit on water, “Nourishing the Dream: Water and the Development of Fair Oaks.”
With the Big Idea nailed down, I was able to begin my in-depth research into the history of Fair Oaks and the role of water in the development of the village. I developed two main storylines with rough research outlines to deliver in a presentation to the
Historical Society at the end of January (see Appendix C Figures 3-4). Using Tilden’s principles of interpretation, these narratives were my interpretations based on the facts I had gathered from several sources such as census data, county assessor’s maps from the early twentieth century, oral histories, and other primary sources. I presented this information at the annual meeting at the end of January to the entire Historical Society.
At that time, I also presented the building committee with my suggestions for carpet and paint colors. These decisions were ultimately ignored, as the day after I presented my design suggestions, the building committee installed a discount carpet and hired an interior designer to decide the colors of the walls. The bright red patterned carpet and
81 mustard wall colors ultimately clashed with our designs. Because we understand the relationship between the visitor and his or her aesthetic experience in a museum, we had to adjust our designs accordingly to keep the presentation professional.
Additionally at this time, Bishop and I looked over the state’s obligations for third- and fourth-grade history curriculum, since we wanted our narratives to fit the curriculum and give schools an opportunity to visit on field trips. We learned that third- grade students were required to: describe geographical features in their local region; trace the ways in which people have used the resources of the local region and modified the physical environment; describe the American Indian nations in their local region; draw from historical and community resources to organize sequence of local historical events; and describe how each period of settlement left its mark on the land. In fourth-grade, students were expected to: understand the physical and human geographic features of the places and regions in California; describe the social, political, cultural, and economic life and interactions among the people of California from the pre-Columbian societies to the
Spanish mission and Mexican rancho periods; discuss the major nations of California
Indians; identify the land and sear routes to and European settlements in California; describe the Spanish exploration and colonization of California and the daily lives of the people—native and nonnative—who occupied the presidios, missions, ranchos, and pueblos; explain life in California from the establishment of the Bear Flag Republic through the Mexican-American War, the Gold Rush, and the granting of statehood; and explain how California became an agricultural and industrial power. The research and curriculum standards guided our design process, the label text writing, and the aesthetics
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of the exhibit panels, and the artifact choice. The Historical Society was not updated on the exact specifications and the president was grateful for us bringing this knowledge to light.
To design the panels, I used Adobe Creative Suite 5.5. I organized my photographs in Adobe Bridge. Once I decided which photographs I wanted to use, I obtained high resolution copies of them. Bishop explained that larger photographs such as backgrounds are better in lower resolutions, because viewers tend to stand further back from them. Smaller photographs, usually eight inches by eleven and a half inches, required higher Dots Per Inches (DPI), typically around 300. If the scans we obtained from the photo archivist were nearly 300 DPI, the photoshop process was relatively straightforward. I cleaned up any dust or missing sections using an autofill content-aware tool, burned sections that were too light, dodged sections that were too dark, changed the midtones and shadows, and often changed the hue to a consistent black and white. As soon as I finished photoshopping, the photos were printer-ready. For the lower-resolution thumbnails, we typically could not reproduce them on the panels much larger than their size as they came to us. This meant that some of the photos were smaller than an index card. To create the panels, I used Adobe Illustrator, which creates an .ai file that can be enlarged or shrunk without losing any digital integrity. For the three dimensional mockups of the building, I used Google Sketchup version 8 and Bishop created a model from a copy of the floorplan (see Appendix C Figure 5).
On February 28th, we held an open house meeting for any member of this
Historical Society to review the panels we had developed from my original storylines
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(see Appendix C Figures 6-11). I received additional research information from a member for the Aerojet section of the narrative and exhibit display. I also received the following input from an anonymous Board member: "I expected more visuals on the walls. Great feedback from those in attendance: more pictures and less words. We really need to tap into [name redacted] wealth of Fair Oaks history and build more of the panels around those facts. Focus more on the People of Fair Oaks and not the mall." Two things about this comment illustrated my frustrations with the design and the level of input from the Board. First, I had originally included several photographs in my original designs.
Over the course of the month of February, these designs were changed and altered by many individuals involved in this project, including the president and Bishop; the edited designs included more secondary labels than I had intended. I originally wished to include more photos with captions and tell the story that way; instead, the designs we presented at the February 28th meeting were a lot more word-heavy and did not include a handful of images I had installed previously. I believe my designs were edited to have more text and less photographs because some individuals believed the interpretation was too “thin,” meaning it was not substantial enough and it did not include enough facts or historical statements. This surprised me, because I tried very hard to follow Tilden’s second rule of interpretation, that information is not interpretation.
Second, this individual’s reference to the Sunrise Mall made it sound as if I placed a large emphasis on the mall in my storyline. The Sunrise Mall was a small portion of a section that I had created to fill in the gaps where the Historical Society lacked original sources past the 1930s. To demonstrate the suburbanization of
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Sacramento’s surrounding communities in the postwar era and the exploding population along the American River, I wanted to use a short reference to the Sunrise Mall, which would also demonstrate an economic shift in Fair Oaks. In my research, I found that many small “mom and pop” businesses in Fair Oaks’ historic village were significantly impacted by the advent of large commercial shopping centers such as Sunrise Mall and had to significantly change their business models to respond to the flow of dollars outside their town. This was a universal trend in suburbia during the postwar period. The members clearly did not understand this method and I did not successfully explain it.
Instead, they saw the Sunrise Mall as irrelevant to the story of Fair Oaks because it resides in Citrus Heights, not their town. The Board instead decided to replace that section with a display on early Fair Oaks schools that featured some of the member’s ancestors.
Again, Stephen Weil warns us of the pitfalls of such a view of local history when he says that local history museums are mostly concerned with “civic virtue” that is largely defined by “success in politics, the professions, or business... the subject matter ultimately celebrated in most of these museums... was the community’s first families.”176
The new schools section would draw on several of the member’s “expertise” in the first schools, mostly descendants of the first teachers in Fair Oaks. Weil’s describes this scenario perfectly when he states that “those who principally supported these museums, served on their boards, worked in them, or even directed them were often none other
176 Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2002), 199.
85 than the descendants of those same first families... the stories that these museums told were invariably success stories.”177
Another member complained that the segment on the Depression “didn’t have any specific information regarding Fair Oaks” and that the Aerojet segment was too long. The members also decided on creating a new panel that would discuss the bridges in Fair
Oaks, and focused on most of the bridges that existed before the 1950s. This step in the design process illustrates the perils of involving too many people in a project, especially one with a strict deadline that ultimately would not be met. Yet despite these setbacks, we went forward with the design, revised the old text, and incorporated as much as we could into the designs for the panels that would be sent to the printer.
In mid-March, Bishop and I decided where the four-sided wooden frames would be placed in the gallery (see Appendix C Figures 12-14). Based on our knowledge of visitor interaction with exhibit content, we laid out the “Traces of the Past” exhibit to the left, and it was to be viewed clockwise to the middle of the room. The “Nourishing the
Dream” exhibit would begin on the west wall, in the corner furthest away from the front doors and would be designed to be read from back to front. The closest display to the door was to be an interactive about water conservation. We consulted the Maidu Museum in Roseville for accuracy and received a helpful secondary source map and key (see
Appendix C Figures 15-16). The panels we developed for the “Traces of the Past” exhibit ultimately went through one more review process, which slowed down the printing and fabrication process. We were able to produce the panels (Appendix C Figures 17-28) but
177 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 199.
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the exhibit was not going to be completed by the Fiesta Days deadline in May. The president assured us that this was not a problem and apologized for all of the extra work.
He acknowledged that the Open House on February 28th was supposed to be a “speak- now-or-forever-hold-your-peace” event, but it turned into a full-fledged review meeting that added several extra steps to our design process and even gave me a large amount of additional original research work to conduct. The “Traces of the Past” panels were constructed and displayed for the Fiesta Days, but the artifacts were not.
In July, I met with the Historical Society’s manager of the artifact collections. At that meeting, I explored their the “Fireside” room, the makeshift museum and collections repository located at the community clubhouse, and reviewed every artifact as it was displayed to determine what best would illustrate the story line we had developed and was already on display (using Burcaw’s Idea Approach to artifact display). At this point of the design, the panels for “Traces of the Past” had already been installed in the gallery, and the artifacts needed to be moved into the gallery in vitrines that we would design.
The collections manager was very concerned with how the artifacts—particularly the
Maidu artifacts that were on loan to them from the Maidu museum in Roseville—would be handled and displayed. I assured her that we are also concerned over the safety of the artifacts, but it did not assuage her concerns. She also requested that we use their original furniture that inhabited the Fireside room. The display cases were old and heavy; modern vitrines today are made out of acrylic instead of glass for safety and aesthetic purposes— they are also minimalist, as to not distract from the artifact itself. The president did his best to convince the collections manager that the old furniture would be placed in storage
87 in case the members wanted to use them instead. The outcome of the meeting was that I chose fourteen artifacts I felt best illustrated the story and documented them in a spreadsheet so that when the time came to move and identify the artifacts, a label would be easy to make.
For each of the fourteen artifacts I chose, I took meticulous notes of the visual characteristics, the dimensions, the provenance of the artifact, and the significance of the artifact to the exhibit (see Appendix C Figure 29). The artifacts that were of particular interest to me included only three Maidu pieces that I felt best represented the collection they had: a lunch box, an elderberry flute, and a worm carrier. I felt these were artifacts with which both children and adults could connect. The Historical Society also had a baseball jersey, rotary banner, Bella Vista High School banner, and a nuanced collection of Fire Department artifacts that I found interesting, particularly a helmet, plaque, and
Captain’s badge that I believed all would fit in the section of the narrative that discusses the community’s development through the 1950s through the 1970s. I also picked an orange picking sack, bottle of San Juan Olive Oil, and smudge pot lighters to illustrate the story of the fruit farming in the first decades of the 20th century.
Once the “Traces of the Past” panels were complete and artifacts were chosen, I began the design for the “Nourishing the Dream” exhibit. With the deadline of the Fiesta days behind us, I was free to design this exhibit without time pressure. Additionally, since the Board was more concerned with the way their history was presented in the permanent exhibit, I had much more creative freedom and significantly less frequent review demands for this exhibit. This temporary exhibit was designed to fit in eight two-
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by-four panels for the four-sided frames. Although my initial designs for “Traces of the
Past” included an interactive, it was replaced with another panel containing photographs and text. For “Nourishing the Dream,” I was very determined to include an interactive display and believed it would fit best at the end, so as to not distract from the narrative.
The plan was to build an interactive on how to conserve water using the model from the
Fair Oaks Water District’s school program designed to teach children about conservation.
It would follow a panel that discussed a major drought in 1976, when water became more closely monitored and conservation efforts were put in place. I also wanted to design the interpretive panels in a way that would appeal to the viewer’s visual expectations, looked modern, and was significantly different aesthetically from the “Traces of the Past” interpretive panels, which was a separate exhibit with different content.
Because I had already completed the research and storyline for “Nourishing the
Dream” and the Board did not make additional research demands on me halfway through my design, the process was much less tedious. I began by writing text that closely followed my narrative ideas from January. I wanted to tell the story as chronologically as possible to accommodate the Board members who wished to create a timeline among the labels and graphics, but I was able to retain thematic content for each display. We began by meeting with the president in early August to discuss the content of the displays. The president was clear that he wanted the message to be that water has always been critical to inhabitation of Fair Oaks, a message to which Bishop and I had no objections. The narrative developed into one that covered the natives’ use of the American River water for bathing, fishing, and drinking; it also addressed the ways miners used water to find
89 gold. Later, the narrative addressed the beginnings of a water infrastructure that enabled farmers to irrigate the thousands of acres of fruit farms, and created a major selling point to investors in the East to move out to Fair Oaks and subdivide the land. We decided to bring the storyline to the present by introducing the Folsom Dam as it was built to accommodate the massive increase in population following World War II and the development of Aerojet in Ranch Cordova. Finally, we decided to discuss the 1976 drought and the beginnings of the conservation movement. They both agreed that my idea of an interactive display at the end was best.
The first panel I designed was an introductory panel that would outline the
“dream” part of the title, and that water was critical in attaining the “dream” (see
Appendix C Figure 30). Most of the photos I obtained from the San Juan Suburban
Water District were black and white, so my color scheme reflected this fact by consistently using an off-white background (so that the printer had a clear boundary to follow when he cut the panels) and black secondary text and captions. The titles and subtitles were to be different colors, but bright colors. To avoid monotony, I changed the locations of the titles, subtitles, photographs, and text on each panel, yet kept the consistency by featuring one photograph cutout which I photoshopped to only show the main subject that best described the panel’s content.
The second panel I designed was contested by Bishop and the president (see
Appendix C Figure 31). I wanted to discuss native uses of water in its own panel, but since the Maidu typically do not wish for their photographs to be taken or shared, I did not have many photographs to use in my design. Instead, I decided to lay the groundwork
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for a future panel on the beginnings of water infrastructure once the Europeans moved to the land. To discuss the European water uses, I had to approach the dispossession of the
Maidu, a topic that could potentially make some of the descendants in Fair Oaks defensive. The text and photos I chose highlighted how the land was acquired by the new population in Fair Oaks. Particularly strong was the sentiment that the natives, who were wiped out by European diseases, were collateral damage to the money-driven “dream- seekers” from the east. This sentiment also implies that there was little to stop the decimation of the native population, and worse, that the new immigrants did not care about the rapid decline of the Maidu inhabitants and simply just waited until they were mostly gone so they could take their land and subdivide it. Bishop and the president believed this was too “intentional,” meaning the language I chose was too biased and strong. I agreed, and complied with their requests that these words be toned down. I was particularly opposed to using the word “disappear” regarding the native population decline, since it seemed to mask the deliberate and intentional imposition of the white immigrants on the natives’ land. In the end, we agreed on new text that discussed the arrival of European trappers, their diseases, the influx of new immigrants after the Gold
Rush, and John Sutter’s Maidu labor force (after most of the population had already been killed).
The third panel discussed the gold rush and the way the miners used water to find gold (see Appendix C Figure 32). The most prominent form of mining in Fair Oaks was dredging, so I made the most visible photograph on the panel a photo of a dredge on the
American River. As a historian concerned with telling a well-rounded story, I wanted to
91 mention the detrimental effects hydraulic mining had on the land. In this case, hydraulic mining was actually never used in Fair Oaks, so I decided it was best to avoid mention of the environmental effects to not confuse the visitors and lead them to believe this happened in Fair Oaks.
The fourth panel I designed was originally going to be a panel that discussed the
North Fork Ditch Company, which I felt was so central to the story of water in Fair Oaks that it deserved its own panel (see Appendix C Figure 33). Bishop and the president agreed, and there was little debate surrounding this information. Similarly, the fifth panel was largely directed by the president, who provided most of the content ideas regarding the land speculation and the promise of water in Fair Oaks (see Appendix C Figure 34).
The president wanted to make sure the theme of this panel was that human activity dropped off in the area after the gold rush until the land speculators “discovered” this prime, minimally-used land that only needed water to lure in new investors. He wanted to discuss the railroad in this development, but due to text limitations and relevance to the water narrative, I only devoted one sentence to it.
The design of the sixth and seventh panels also went smoothly (see Appendix C
Figures 35-36). The sixth panel, “A Fruitful Community,” covered the role of water in irrigation and the agricultural era of Fair Oaks that I identified to occur between colonization and 1932. I also mentioned the construction of the “Fair Oaks 40” Pipeline, which was built along with the Folsom Dam to irrigate the rest of the farms that survived past the freeze in 1932. The seventh panel, “From Orchards to Lawns,” was designed to bridge the time period of irrigation and agriculture to the time period of postwar
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suburbanization and population explosion in Sacramento’s surrounding communities.
This panel was to focus on the role of water in the community past the 1930s, and would bring the content up to the 1970s when the drought occurred—a major moment that I identified in my research as the turning point to conservation practices among local government officials and residents alike.
The eighth and final panel for “Nourishing the Dream” was to briefly discuss the
1976 drought, the installation of water meters in the 1980s, and the conservation efforts.
It was also to include an iPad interactive element on water conservation (see Appendix C
Figure 37). Originally I envisioned an interactive that allows visitors to measure how much water they can save by performing certain activities. I designed a barometer light- up installation that started at the bottom and measured to the top, with buttons that sat on either side of the barometer that stated different water-conserving activities such as “Use the sprinklers to water your lawn before 10am and after 6pm” or “Take a 5 minutes shower instead of a 10 minute shower.” When the visitor pushed the button of a particular activity, the barometer installation would light up to the particular measure of water it would save. This was scrapped in favor of an iPad interactive in the interest of time and energy. By this point, we had been working for a year on this project, and it still did not look or feel complete.
There are two panels left for “Traces of the Past” still in the design phase; the original panels on community-building in Fair Oaks I designed were discarded in favor of a panel on service groups in Fair Oaks and a panel on the community’s first schools. I completed the text (see Appendix C Figure 38-39) and identified the photos to be used
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(see Appendix C Figures 40-47). These panels will be completed at a later date. The president I worked with during this project is no longer in his position and the new leadership has a much different role in the exhibits’ development. My design concepts are submitted and now it is in their hands to approve and complete the work. The
“Nourishing the Dream” panels are also submitted to them in PDF form and ready for their approval; evidently, the new leadership wants to change much of the photographs and text. As soon as they are done, we can fabricate the panels, install them, and move the artifacts into their locations in the museum.
The fabrication and installation phases of the exhibit design were done only for the “Traces of the Past” exhibit. Once the panels were designed and went through a final approval process, we converted them into .tiff files for the printer. Bishop had previously worked with a company called Century Graphics in Sacramento, which gave us three printing options. First, the most expensive option was half-inch gator board. Gator board consists of a thick cardstock on both sides of a thick styrofoam composite. Gator board is typically used in larger, fuller-budgeted exhibits because it looks the most professional.
Additionally, it is easy to print displays and dry mount them onto gator board, using an xacto knife to cut out the shape. It also hangs flat, even from small support surfaces. The price to print the panels at full bleed on half-inch wide gatorboard in two-by-four foot sections, it would cost $108 dollars each, but we would not need to dry mount or cut the panels individually. The other options we had were 4mm Sintra at $64 or 6mm Sintra at
$82 each. Sintra is a thicker material that feels like plastic yet it is very lightweight. It has a matte finish and can bend and morph much like wood. Thinner Sintra is easier to bend
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and much more flexible, but any thickness of the material is prone to warp over time if it is not attached to a very rigid backing.
We all settled on the half-inch gator board and ordered the prints. When we received the prints, we noticed that the files had warped on one of the panels and the photos were displaying inverted colors; the value in always ordering proofs is limitless.
Once the proofs were approved—after the Board members each helped rewrite the text to fit their preferences—they were printed and mounted on the four-sided frames. The panels each had blocks of wood that held them in place on the frame. These were designed this way so that they could easily move sides or be transported to the wall if needed.
The vitrines have not been fabricated yet. Bishop and I envisioned modern- looking display cases that fit the artifacts (rather than have the artifacts fit the cases) and are not very expensive to make. They can even be purchased in pre-determined sizes and are typically less than fifty dollars in the small sizes, such as the sizes of the artifacts I identified in July. Due to the city’s budget constraints, the Historical Society recently was evicted from their Fireside room, and now the old, heavy display furniture will be moved to the History Gallery. Keeping these display cases would significantly distract visitors from the artifacts, but unfortunately, local historical societies are bound by limited budgets and options. While there is always time to upgrade display cases, some of the members seem very attached to them. The artifacts have not been moved into the Gallery, and we are awaiting approval of the artifacts and panels before we can even begin any more of the fabrication and installation phases.
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Chapter 6
CONCLUSION
Fair Oaks is a community that, for all intents and purposes, has retained its
“village mentality” from days past. The residents are very proud of their heritage, a sentiment that is clearly visible when attending community events or even walking down the main street in Old Town, where the buildings that once housed the first general store, the first pharmacy, and the first automobile repair shop still stand. Driving through Fair
Oaks, one mostly sees quiet neighborhoods punctuated by large land tracts and dense trees. The humble surroundings of the Fair Oaks village house a close community with families that have inhabited the town since its earliest days as well as families who move to the town drawn in by the promise of a tight-knit community. Despite a few setbacks, the community continues to strengthen their ties to each other and to their roots. Life in
Fair Oaks is not lonely; one always has someone to turn to, to help, and to connect to during tough times. During my research in the field, I encountered many residents who enjoy life in Fair Oaks and could not imagine living anywhere else. A telling example of the laid-back community feel is the regular occurrence of wandering chickens along many downtown streets; the residents accommodate their daily schedules to their chickens, and it is a source of pride among lifelong Fair Oaks residents.
The Fair Oaks Historical Society aims to retain these community values. The members are dedicated and knowledgeable individuals. Many members have excellent specialized knowledge that was very helpful when filling in gaps in the Historical
Society’s collections. Members work diligently to ensure that their narratives are saved
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for future generations. While they are intensely devoted to the stories of their ancestors, the historical record in Fair Oaks lacks much of the outside stories that would make the record more well-rounded and inclusive. According to the literature on historical societies, this is a very common occurrence. My suggestion to the members of the
Historical Society is to allow for new interpretations that challenge the official narrative revered by the members; historical interpretation is always changing, and there is never one right answer or one single interpretation. In what seems to be a universal issue among local historical societies, scholars and academics might take local history narratives and collections more seriously in general if their narratives include stories other than celebrating successes and overcoming obstacles. It would also benefit them greatly to seek out the narratives of controversial times and different ethnicities and lifestyles.
Future exhibits might focus less on the “first schools” or “first bridges” and perhaps include more information on change over time in more interactive way. For example, instead of a panel on the first schools in Fair Oaks, I propose that the Historical Society make an interactive exhibit that juxtaposes the stories and photos of older schools and current schools, and might include schools that are in planning stages that will educate
Fair Oaks’ future children. Instead of telling stories about buildings, it can tell stories about the way students at a particular school dressed, the games they played, and the lessons they learned throughout the decades.
An administrative suggestion I would make to the Historical Society is related to the reality that the members are hesitant to allow outsiders to manipulate or challenge the traditional historical narratives. Because they do not trust outside historians to represent
97 their history in a flattering light, they managed the project at every step of the way down to the specific words used in the text. They are the client, so we obliged to their requests, but it was extremely difficult to make any progress when I was expected to get unanimous Board approval at so many design steps. It seemed as if everyone wanted to tell every story that mattered to them, even though these stories were already told several times. Many Board members wanted to have a hand in creating the text and choosing the photographs. As a professionally trained historian, I believed I was giving them the best representation of their collections on the panels and the artifacts, but my choices were not what they believed to be the most important elements to their story. If the Historical
Society would like to contract future work, they will need to draw very strict boundaries around what they expect from a consultant and what they want to do themselves; sending the consultant to members’ houses all over the Sacramento area and not using the information gleaned from those visits is a waste of precious resources for all those involved.
With all of the stresses this project brought on us, Bishop and I learned valuable lessons. Aside from so many practical lessons I learned from Bishop, such as wording the interpretive labels and creating interesting displays, I learned how to work as a consultant for a local historical society and all that entails. I also walked away from this project with a clearer idea of my priorities and ethics as a historian, where I am comfortable compromising, and how to do extensive research to fill in holes in the historical record.
For all the stress and discomfort that I felt during this process, I was very grateful for the exposure to so many pressing issues facing public historians in local museums today.
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From my research, it seems that when new historians start joining these societies and running their historical programs, it will dramatically shift the output of these groups. I believe they will transform to be open-minded, more inclusive, and more visionary. Local historical societies will start to see themselves as part of a larger human history in addition to safeguarding detailed local historical narratives. I believe my work with the
Fair Oaks Historical Society is a case study of this incoming transition and will help future public historians understand such a shift. I feel very lucky to have participated in such an important project at such an important time for the field of public history.
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APPENDIX A
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Figure 1
Sunset Magazine collage and advertisement.
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Figure 2
The glass bottle collection of the Fair Oaks Historical Society.
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APPENDIX B
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 1
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 2
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 3
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 4
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 5
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 6
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Figure 1
Proposal for Project Development page 7
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APPENDIX C
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Figure 1
Frame Concept for History Gallery
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Figure 2
Frame Details
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 1 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 2 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 3 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 4 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 5 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 6 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 7 of 8
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Figure 3
“Traces of the Past” Narrative page 8 of 8
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Figure 4
“Nourishing the Dream” Narrative page 1 of 2
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Figure 4
“Nourishing the Dream” Narrative page 2 of 2
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Figure 5
Floorplan of History Gallery
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Figure 6
East Alcove Wall design concept for 2/28/12
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Figure 7
West Alcove Wall design concept for 2/28/12
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Figure 8
Back Alcove Wall design concept for 2/28/12
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Figure 9
East Wall design concept for 2/28/12
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Figure 10
Front Wall design concept for 2/28/12
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Figure 11
Frame design example for 2/28/12
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Figure 12
3D gallery design view #1 (northwest perspective) from 3/17/12
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Figure 13
3D gallery design view #2 (southeast perspective) from 3/17/12
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Figure 14
3D gallery design #3 (southwest perspective) from 3/17/12
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Figure 15
Maidu map
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Figure 16
Maidu map key
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Figure 17
Panel E1 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 18
Panel E2 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 19
Introductory Panel F1 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 20
Panel F2 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 21
Panel F3 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 22
Panel F4 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 23
A1-A2 Panel original text part 1
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Figure 24
A1-A2 Panel original text part 2
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Figure 25
Panel A3 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 26
Panel A4 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 27
Panel A5 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 28
Panel A6 (“Traces of the Past”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 29
“Traces of the Past” artifact spreadsheet
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Figure 30
Panel W1 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 31
Panel W2 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 32
Panel W3 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 33
Panel W4 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 34
Panel W5 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 36
Panel W6 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 36
Panel W7 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 37
Panel W8 (“Nourishing the Dream”) - 2’x 4’
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Figure 38
PCA panel text (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 39
Service Group panel text (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 40
2005.1.610 Background photo for PCA panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 41
2006.1.61 photo of dredge for PCA panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 42
2006.1.37 photo of final Fair Oaks dredge for PCA panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 43
2006.1.61 photo of Frank Brugger for PCA panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 44
2005.1.417 photo of Rotary Club store for Service Group Panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 45
2005.1.176 photo of Red Cross women from World War I for Service Groups panel
(“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 46
Photo of Charlie Edgett (Rotarian) presenting scholarship to Bella Vista students for
Services Group panel (“Traces of the Past”)
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Figure 47
1963 photo of Rotarians for Services Group panel (“Traces of the Past”)
166
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