Pleasant Valley Historical Society Adds Home of Its Own to Collection

A tour of a tiny new museum in Camarillo can take more than an hour when Jack Fulkerson is conducting it.

That’s because Fulkerson, a descendant of a local pioneer family, waited more than 20 years to give it.

He and other members of the Pleasant Valley Historical Society labored more than two decades to secure a building to house their eclectic collection of artifacts, which come from the days when what is now Camarillo was peopled by Chumash Indians and later, by disappointed gold prospectors who turned to farming as a last resort.

The Pleasant Valley Historical Society Museum on Las Posas Road opened to visitors on weekends in November. Now that Fulkerson, 74, finally has a venue, he is not about to risk visitors’ leaving without the benefit of a few anecdotes that bring the displays to life.

Artifacts Explained

“See those rug beaters?” he said recently, pointing to a rusty pair of long, paddle-shaped steel objects in a display case. “We would hang rugs over the clothesline and beat the devil out of them with those things, to get the dust out. There weren’t any vacuum cleaners then.

“Those round wood things? Those are darning eggs. Housewives stuck them in socks they were darning so they wouldn’t prick themselves with their needles.

“And the scale was used to weigh eggs, which were sold by their weight. That knitting machine was used by housewives to turn out socks, though not everyone got the hang of it, from the letters we have from the turn of the century.”

In addition to household objects from the early 1900s, the museum has Chumash baskets, bowls and arrowheads, colorful embroidered shawls from the 1840s and replicas of local historic buildings. It also houses a small collection of memorabilia, such as movie posters from the career of Joel McCrea, who owns land in Ventura County.

Until the museum opened, some of the items were displayed in a corner of Fulkerson’s hardware store in Somis, a community of 375 people just north of Camarillo.

Search for Building

“Jack is a saver,” said his wife, Barbara, 68. “He just kept saving things while the society went through one frustrating attempt to get a building after another.”

Founded in 1967 to establish a museum, the historical society ran into a series of obstacles. First, members had hoped to dismantle an abandoned Southern Pacific railroad depot and reassemble it at another location, but after years of negotiation, those plans fell through. Then the city gave its old library to a group of senior citizens instead of to the society.

Finally, in 1983, the society won the support of Camarillo Mayor Sandi Bush, who arranged for the society to rent for $1 a year the former headquarters of the Camarillo Water Department. Members gutted the tiny building and spent about $15,000 to renovate it. They hope to eventually expand it and put in a garden of native plants, said Dick Davis, 71, a society member.