Good-bye, Old Friend: The end of an off- and on-again partnership with the California Historical Society
by Maureen Hanlon, CGS with credit to Kathryn Doyle, former CGS president and blog editor (see: https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/the-history-of-the-california-historical-society-the-beginnings/)
Sad news was published in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning after a general letter was sent to its membership by the Interim Director Jen Whitley of the California Historical Society. The society is ending after 154 years.
Its collection of 600,000 items, happily, will be taken over and housed at Stanford University as part of the Bill Lane Center for the American West collection.
CGS has a long history with the California Historical Society beginning in 1902 when we were a joint society. We remained a part of the joint effort until the unfortunate demise in the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906.
After the earthquake, each group sought to find a suitable home and then separately established and built collections of noteworthy and historically significant research materials.
In 1962, the California Historical Society acquired title to the CGS collection and for the next twenty years the library was housed at the CHS building at Pacific and Laguna Streets. The relationship with the California Historical Society lasted until CGS leased a new headquarters in the Flood Building at 870 Market Street, Suite 1124, San Francisco, and moved in on November 1, 1983. After months of negotiations, the society reached agreement with the California Historical Society and reacquired 85% of the genealogical collection sold in 1962. We had several moves after that, establishing ourselves at 2201 Broadway eighteen years ago in March.
Our program and events committee established a relationship with CHS in the last few years and were pleased to be able to offer members of both groups tours of each of our sites and a joint presentation on western history. We will miss our partner and the large contributions they have made to preserving our California history.
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Thank you, Maureen for this historical review. I was not aware of the link between CHS and CGS for so many years. The history of that alone is enough to take pause at. Although I only visited CHS a handful of times, the most memorable was a field trip that I took there with CGS. It was March 20, 2013 and because of that trip, I started my rabbit-hole journey towards annual visits to the Mariani Fountain.
On that sunny March day, I took BART to SF and walked the 2 blocks to the California Historical Society. I remember thumbing through an old-fashioned card catalog and just the info and titles alone made me happy. I made a listing of those I wanted to look at and the librarian went to retrieve. Among the retrievals were a poster for the Mariani hardware store, a letter about the costs going up for the hardware store, and a newspaper article about a fountain with a photo of said fountain. I’d seen the fountain before in photos that I received from the hardware store itself—found in the walls of the hardware store as they were renovating. But I had never thought much about the fountain.
I was able to track down the fountain using some other blog posts and historical documents and was eventually able to gaze on that fountain like the Mariani family had all those years prior.
Never underestimate the value of a trip to an archive and my forever thanks go to those who keep them for us. Please visit the CHS collection at Stanford. You never know what you will find!
P.S. You may notice I use the Mariani family a lot in my CGS blog posts as examples. They are not my family in blood, but I did write a book about them and I do think of them as my own. They are really the only San Francisco “family” I have, so I use them a lot. Fair warning, you may come to love them as much as I do.
P.S.S. I find it hard to mention things and then not add the photo. So here are all the treasures I found that day at CHS along with one of the old photos I had of the fountain prior to this.
