Burbank Is Jampacked With History : Museum: The Historical Society has run out of space to display exhibits but is planning to expand the viewing area.

The Burbank Historical Society is having a hard time keeping up with the past these days.

The nonprofit citizens committee, which operates the Gordon R. Howard Museum, has over the past few months had to turn down, among other things, a 19th-Century covered wagon and a 1904 steam-powered Knox people-mover because of a lack of space.

“We have more things to display than we have area to display it,” said Dave Filson, president of the Historical Society. “We’ve just flat run out of space even to accept things.”

Filson said there are plans to expand the museum complex, which includes three buildings on a side street next to George Izay Park. One of the buildings houses historical displays. Another holds a collection of antique vehicles as well as a second-floor storage area.

The third structure, the Mentzer House, is a Victorian-style structure built in 1887 by the Providencia Land, Water and Development Co., which was responsible for plotting the future city that was founded by dentist David Burbank.

Filson said the building that houses the antique vehicles will be enlarged to include a restoration and storage room, an addition to the second-floor storage area and a second-floor boardroom. The new boardroom, he said, will free up a large room in the display building for more exhibits.

The Historical Society recently began taking bids on the $100,000 expansion project, with construction work expected to begin in early March. Filson said the money will come from donations, fund-raisers and the museum’s reserves.

“We’ll almost double the space we have to store things,” Filson said.

The museum’s storage area is now stacked to the ceiling with maps, photographs and paintings of different periods in Burbank’s history. One painting shows a horse-filled San Fernando Road at the turn of the century, while another depicts a Pacific Electric streetcar making its way down the same stretch of road on its way to Glendale and Pasadena.

Other items include copies of the Burbank Review, dating back to the early 1900s, and an old clock made out of an airplane propeller donated by a former Lockheed employee.

Mary Jane Strickland, who was instrumental in establishing the 400-member Historical Society in 1973 and later in getting the museum built, said she and her husband recently purchased a computer so they can begin cataloguing all the items in storage.

In the meantime, residents just keep dropping things off.

“Sometimes it’s junk,” Filson said. “Sometimes it’s treasures.”

One of the treasures is a framed May 12, 1900, Boston Post newspaper clipping detailing then-heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries’ winning 23-round title fight against Gentleman Jim Corbett. Jeffries was a longtime Burbank resident who owned and operated a successful cattle ranch in what was then a small town.

But the clipping is only one of many items the Historical Society would like to display.

“We have a 1923 Moreland truck we’d like to restore, but we have no place to put it,” Filson said. The museum recently acquired the truck, which is being kept in a city storage yard.

It was built by the Moreland Motor Truck Co., Burbank’s first major industry, which operated from 1917 to 1937. The museum already has a 1922 Moreland bus and is negotiating to buy a 1927 Moreland fire engine, Filson said.

Not everything donated or offered to the museum has to do with Burbank. “A lot of it’s just old,” Filson said.

Some of the odds and ends include an old telephone switchboard brought over from Catalina Island and an old, scaled-down version of the Liberty Bell.

“Somebody just dropped it off,” Filson said of the bell. “What significance it has to Burbank, or why we got it . . . I don’t know.”

But the museum’s permanent displays are all tied to the city’s history. For example, there are tableaux of David Burbank’s dental office, a general store featuring canned goods from the Burbank Canning Co., and the Brusso Winery, one of a dozen established in the city in the early 1900s and that operated until 1967.

Another display features a figure in blackface--Al Jolson as the Jazz Singer, in a tribute to the release of the first all-talking motion picture, made by Warner Bros. in Burbank in 1927.

There are quirky items, such as the first electric meter installed in Burbank and a life-size figure of James Jeffries inside a small boxing ring.

There are also exhibits by such major Burbank companies as NBC and Walt Disney. The museum’s centerpiece is an aviation exhibit by Lockheed Aircraft Corp. that features suspended model airplanes and a display of photographs and drawings of historic flights and airplanes.

“It is very uncommon for a city of this size to have the types of displays that we have,” Filson said.

Strickland agreed. “A lot of people say, ‘Burbank museum, big deal.’ They don’t realize what we have here. And when they come in they say, ‘Wow!’ ”

Strickland said that without the help of Gordon R. Howard, a prominent city real estate developer, the museum never would have been built.

Howard donated land to the Historical Society, which then sold the property and used the proceeds to build the two existing structures in 1983 and to keep the museum going. Strickland said the city has also helped by leasing the parkland the museum sits on to the Historical Society for $1 a year.

Strickland, a retired city information official, said she decided to organize a historical society in 1973 after she was unable to find accurate information about her father’s term as one of the city’s first police chiefs.

After that, Strickland said, “I just started collecting things, putting things together and talking to people, and pretty soon I was a woman possessed.”

The museum is open from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sundays. There is no charge, but the Historical Society asks for a $1 donation.

“We always tell people it’s the cheapest entertainment in Burbank,” Filson said.