History’s Pay Dirt : 19th-Century Chinatown Emerges at Ventura Excavation

Underneath what was a parking lot until last month, archeologists have uncovered shards of opium pipes, ceramic dishes and ale bottles buried by residents of a Chinatown more than a century ago.

Seven archeologists, who are winding up a 10-day excavation today on Ventura’s Figueroa Street, are digging for trash pits several feet deep, hoping to fill gaps in the city’s history.

“It gives us a full picture of what their life was like,” said John Foster, who is managing the project for Greenwood and Associates of Pacific Palisades. “They were washing their clothes, they were dying, eating and they lived here. They had their shops here,” he said.

Ten wooden buildings once stood on the site, which housed at least one-third of the primarily Cantonese population that lived in Chinatown here from the 1860s until the early 1900s, Foster said.

During the Gold Rush, he said, the ratio of Chinese men to women was about 9 to 1. Many ran laundries, toiled in the fields and operated fishing businesses.

But because of prejudice, jealousy and political pressure to “clean up the town,” Chinatown was dismantled about 1906 and its residents moved to different areas of Ventura and Oxnard, Foster said. Some buildings were demolished, while others were relocated.

“It’s really sad,” said Monica Nolan, a planner for the Ventura Redevelopment Agency, which is providing the $41,000 to conduct the dig. “It’s what we did with the Indians. It’s what we did with the blacks.”

From the layers of dirt that mark the passage of time, Foster and his crew have pulled numerous remains of Chinatown: pig and cattle bones, medicinal vials, toothbrushes, barrel hoops, imported ceramic dishes and pieces of the game Go.

Similar artifacts were found, as well as evidence of cubbyholes used by prostitutes, in a recent Chinatown dig in downtown Los Angeles, said Foster, who has been unearthing relics for 22 years.

So far, about a dozen pipes have been found at the Ventura site, and Foster saidthey were used by only part of the population.

The crew also discovered a sewage ditch lined with large cobblestones leading toward the beach, as well as the tile floor from a Mission-period building that has never been mapped.

Foster was excited about the floor, which he believes was built between 1770 and 1830, because it is made of broken pieces of rounded roof tiles. “It’s something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’re always looking for gaps in our data.”

The redevelopment agency bought the site in May, 1991, for $190,400 from the Soo Hoo family, which owns China Gardens Cafe in Ventura. The agency wants to prepare the 13,388-square-foot parcel for commercial use, Nolan said.

The Greenwood firm has been conducting excavations in Ventura since 1963, including one in the 1970s that proved successful enough to create and fill the Albinger Archeological Museum, Foster said.

While Foster sat mapping what he called “features” of the Chinatown site--such as where a trash pit or a building has been discovered--his crew members stood in three-foot-deep trenches digging for history.

Referring to an 1886 map on his clipboard, Foster stood on the dirt once known as China Alley. Five feet of the former throughway lies under the Knights of Columbus building next door.

Archeological technician Doug McIntosh, 25, dressed like movie archeologist Indiana Jones, broke up clumps of silt-laden dirt and separated out the bones, metals, ceramics and glass.

“I can tell you what they were eating,” McIntosh said, pointing to the bones. Alluding to the broken ale bottles, he said: “I think they drank a little after work.”

The artifacts will be catalogued and taken to a lab where they will be cleaned and analyzed for age and geographical origin, Foster said. The most interesting relics could end up in the Albinger Archeological Museum, he said.

If the site proves to be historically significant, any developer would have to develop a plan to protect the history buried there.