Newland House Challenges Museum for Pieces of History

A long-simmering dispute over ownership of invaluable Native American artifacts is heating up as the city prepares to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Newland House, built by one of Huntington Beach’s pioneer families.

Mary Newland began collecting hand-woven Native American baskets at the turn of the century, said Cheryl Robinson, administrative assistant to the city’s Community Services Department. Newland also kept prehistoric stone artifacts such as mortars and pestles unearthed in 1898 during excavation for the house, built on the site of an ancient Native American village.

In 1935, she gave part of her collection to what is now the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. Newland House trustees contend that Mary Newland lent the pieces, but Bowers officials say she donated them outright.

“It would be nice to have the baskets back at the home,” Maureen Rivers, a Newland House trustee, said this week. “We only have one basket and a black-and-white picture of Mary Newland showing off her basket collection.”

“This is an important historical asset to the city,” she added. “We would like them back.”

Correspondence over several years between Bowers officials and activists for the city-owned Newland House has yet to resolve the dispute.

“Our records show Mary Newland left the baskets to the museum,” said Armand Labbe, Bowers’ curator. “Additional pieces were donated several years later by one of the Newland daughters.”

Labbe said the museum has documents that show it is the rightful owner of the pieces and will not hand them over unless other records, such as a will, prove differently.

“Over the years, we have not seen any documentation,” Labbe said. “We can’t be returning artifacts to just anybody.”

In fact, he said, at this point the museum is legally bound to keep the pieces.

Historians say Mary Newland apparently began collecting the baskets as she traveled by horse and buggy to the Palm Springs area to visit a daughter.

“They are some of the finest handmade baskets in the world and reflect the highest point of California basketry,” said Paul Apodaca, a sociology professor at Chapman University in Orange and former curator of the Native American collection at Bowers. “Baskets don’t usually last long, so to have these is important.”

The stone items too are invaluable examples of California and Western American Native American art, Apodaca said. In the 1930s, archeologists estimated that some of the pieces were made by the Gabrielino Indians as early as 5000 B.C.

The Newland collection is significant enough that it was included in a late-1970s touring exhibit by the Smithsonian Institution showcasing Native American artwork.

Newland House activists say the collection belongs where it started: in the same oak cabinet where Mary Newland kept it under lock and key.

Trustee Rivers says bringing the collection back to one of the last remaining Queen Anne-style Victorian homes in the city would give visitors a better sense of what the pioneering Newland family was all about.

Mary Newland and husband William moved from the Midwest and built the two-story, nine-room house on a bluff at what is now Beach Boulevard and Adams Avenue. They reared seven daughters and three sons there and grew chili peppers, lima beans and sugar beets on a 500-acre ranch.

Signal Oil Co. leased the house after Mary Newland’s death in 1952 and donated it to the city of Huntington Beach in 1972 as part of a development agreement. The city’s Historical Society began restoring it two years later.

Former Bowers curator Apodaca said that he is sensitive to the plight of Newland House activists, but added that such disputes are common.

As a Smithsonian associate, he said, he has often seen situations in which a family will donate priceless items, then have second thoughts.

“Frequently, a family makes more of an emotional plea than a legal request,” he said. The Newland House situation, he said, “is not an isolated case. . . . Without documentation, there is not much the museum can do.”

Apodaca suggested that the Newland House ask to borrow the Bowers collection for the centennial year, with the provision that researchers could continue to study the pieces.

Newland House activists say that could be their only recourse now. The city recently sent Bowers officials a letter requesting a loan, but has yet to receive a response.

“We would like to borrow the baskets,” Rivers said. “I think that would be a reasonable request, especially during this anniversary.”