Wells Fargo Museum of S.D. History to Open

The Wells Fargo History Museum, with exhibits ranging from the priceless “Davies watch” to an 1867 stagecoach, is scheduled to open today at Old Town State Historical Park.

The opening ceremony at noon will feature a ribbon-cutting with 150 area schoolchildren in attendance and the arrival of Wells Fargo Bank dignitaries in a replica of a 19th-Century Wells Fargo stagecoach from California’s gold-mining days.

Museum admission is free. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

The 1,000-square-foot museum is housed in the former state of California Visitor Center at the corner of San Diego Avenue and Mason Street in the state park.

Wells Fargo spent five years and $120,000 planning and creating the museum and remodeling the visitors center, said museum curator Michael Shanahan. Wells Fargo also has history museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento.

The museum will be part of the San Diego Unified School District’s history curriculum for fourth-grade students, Shanahan said. Groups of students are to visit the museum twice a day to meet state education requirements for studying California history.

“Our No. 1 commitment is to education,” Shanahan said. “We’re happy to be part of the San Diego school system.”

Visitors to the “hands-on” museum will be allowed to look through the 1860s business records of Ephraim W. Morse, a San Diego merchant and Wells Fargo agent, and examine balance scales, coins and other priceless of the era, many of which pertain to San Diego history, Shanahan said.

Exhibits will include an Abbot-Downing Concord stagecoach purchased by Wells Fargo in 1867, an audio-visual theater and displays highlighting Wells Fargo documents, furniture and fixtures.

The showcase exhibit will be the “Davies watch,” a 24-carat gold watch given by Wells Fargo in 1873 as a reward to a San Diego man who returned a bank treasure box that had been lost from a Wells Fargo stagecoach.

Thomas Davies asked for a reward of $10 for recovering the box, which held $10,000 in gold from the Julian gold mines. The bank gave him the $10 plus the watch, valued then at $600 and today considered priceless, Shanahan said.

In the 1850s, Old Town was the county seat of San Diego, then one of the largest and least-populated counties in California. Wells Fargo had an important role in developing the area with its express mail, stagecoaches and banking services, and its history museum will highlight those accomplishments, Shanahan said.

The bank’s history department will oversee the museum.

Shanahan, a La Mesa resident and San Diego State University graduate, said Wells Fargo plans to move the museum within three years to the larger Colorado House, one of the state park’s original structures from the mid-1800s.

The Colorado House, which will be the museum’s permanent home, will accommodate more exhibits.