History Archive Emerging From Its Own Difficult Past

In 19th century Los Angeles, county officials had a simple way to discourage ballot fraud. Handwritten logs gave physical descriptions of voters that often included scars and deformities from the era’s rough frontier work.

Laborer and Irish immigrant Richard Dwyer, for example, was missing his left foot, according to an inky entry in the leather-bound 1896 registration book. A few pages later, oil rigger Frank Fray, from Maine, was registered, noting the second finger of his right hand was crushed. Both men could read and sign their names, the registry reported.

Those vivid nuggets of the past are now stored on metal shelves in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, down the stairs from the more popular dinosaur bones and stuffed and mounted lions. They are in the Seaver Center for Western History Research, a collection of more than 1 million documents, books, photographs, posters and maps--even cattle brands on leather and Mexican-era court records--that scholars say are key to studying 19th and early 20th century Southern California. That is, when researchers and students can get in.

The Seaver Center is emerging from a difficult chapter of its own history. County budget cuts and staff reductions starting seven years ago closed the collection and its narrow reading room to the public for about six months in 1994. Today, with some staff restored, it is open only two days a week, by appointment. Cataloging work is badly backed up in the climate-controlled storerooms.

“It’s just a tragedy what the county let happen,” said the Rev. Michael Engh, an associate professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He said the Seaver is “one of those great gold mines that is little known because access is so limited.”

Now, however, help is coming from an Exposition Boulevard neighbor. Officials recently announced a kind of marriage between USC and the Seaver, an unusual relationship between a private university and a public repository.

USC will provide more than $350,000 over the next five years for the salary of a new full-time Seaver curator and to extend research hours. In exchange, USC can call the Seaver an affiliate library and list those holdings in USC catalogs along with its own extensive local history trove. The Seaver materials will still be owned and managed by the county museum and stay there.

The new arrangement is expected to encourage more visitors, said Janet Fireman, chief of history at the museum. “We have this collection for two purposes: to preserve it and for it to be used to elucidate the past,” she said. “This frustration was not having it used as much as we would like to have it used.”

Across the street, USC is pleased to get bragging rights about Seaver holdings without having to build more storage space, said Victoria Steele, head of special collections at the university’s library. Besides, she added, it would be extremely difficult to actually acquire such seminal materials as the museum’s letters and documents of Antonio Franco Coronel and Ygnacio del Valle, both Mexican-born mayors of Los Angeles in the 1850s. “It’s the best solution for all concerned,” said Steele.

The link between the museum and USC adds to the growing sense of renewal in Exposition Park, most notably with last year’s opening of the California Science Center. The deal comes at a time of increasing international interest in Los Angeles history, a trend that began after the 1984 summer Olympics and hastened, often on a darker note, with the riots in 1992.

Scholars describe the Seaver as among three or four mandatory stopping points around the state for anyone researching Southern California history. “I’m absolutely delighted at any move that will enhance access to the Seaver collection for both scholars and the general public,” said Peter Blodgett, curator of Western historical manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

But even for a layman with an interest in the past, a tour of the Seaver’s holdings can be heaven.

Images of Early Los Angeles

The 300,000 images in the photo collection show, among many other things, a Southern California astonishingly empty of people and rich in farmland, a downtown Los Angeles of unpaved streets and Victorian mansions. Original glass-plate negatives and daguerreotypes capture the humanity of pioneers and Native Americans.

Stills from silent movies help document the industry that came to be synonymous with the once-sleepy town of Hollywood. (The papers and photos of early motion picture cowboy William S. Hart are in the Seaver, as are the work of pre-World War II art directors.)

“It’s a tremendously important collection to me, and always been a kind of secret to the public,” said author Leonard Pitt, now a visiting professor of Los Angeles history at UCLA. He attributed the Seaver’s low public profile in part to its basement location in a building mainly devoted to the natural sciences, a holdover from when the county had one unified museum for history, science and art.

At the museum’s 1913 opening, the history collection was based on material donated by the Historical Society of Southern California. Over the years, it grew mostly through gifts and the rescue of public documents headed for trash bins, officials said.

The Seaver name was added in 1986, after the reading room and storage areas were rebuilt with a grant from the Seaver Institute, founded by wealthy Los Angeles oilman Frank Roger Seaver, who died in 1964. His philanthropy helped support higher education throughout California, including USC and Pepperdine University.

Like many researchers, Pitt praises the Seaver staff but says he has found it difficult to work around the library’s limited hours.

“It is very frustrating,” said Miroslava Chavez, a Chicano history expert who is writing a postdoctoral project at UC San Diego about 19th century women in California. She read the Seaver’s volumes of Spanish-language court records handwritten in the 1840s and ‘50s.

Also kept on 10-foot-high shelves in the locked storeroom are 19th century logs of prisoners at the Los Angeles County Jail and formal documents for incorporating new businesses. An estimated 70,000 postcards, dating to the 1890s, boost tourism with images of horse-drawn Rose Parades and the homes of silent era movie stars. All those items contain tantalizing hints of life back then, as do county tax assessor volumes, which record land holdings and possessions with colorful specificity.

In 1875, for example, the assessor put a value of $1,535 on a 52-acre Compton farm, including the house, wagons, one cow, two hogs and furniture. That year’s resulting tax bill for the J.W. Gaines family was $30.39, the ledger states in perfect handwriting.

Ranching Artifacts

Then there are the books that hold the carefully drawn designs of cattle brands and ear notches, just in case of a lost dogie or some rustling. An estimated 200 or so leather swatches bearing the cattle brands are stored, but not yet sorted.

The Seaver now has two full-time employees, neither paid by the county, Fireman said. One salary is provided by the Natural History Museum Foundation and the other by a grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation.

“Even if we had the doors closed, we could spend the rest of our lives organizing and cataloging,” said collections manager John Cahoon, who tends the fragile manuscripts with the care of a loving parent. The expected hiring this summer of a new curator, he said, will help speed cataloging work.

Judson Grenier, a professor emeritus of history at Cal State Dominguez Hills, said, “It really is quite amazing that a private university would come to the aid of a public agency.”