The Santa Maria Valley Historical Society’s founders scroll is framed under glass, keeping the large piece of parchment protected. Now, more than half a century later, visitors to the society’s museum can see the elegant cursive signatures of more than 200 Santa Marians who signed the scroll in late August and September of 1955. Names familiar to any Santa Marian are found across the document, including Miller, Taylor, Fesler, Rice, Thornburg, Mussel, Jones, Hancock, Righetti, Tunnell, Black, Clark, Tognazzini, Shaw, and many others.
The scroll was an idea the Santa Maria organization gleaned from the Santa Barbara Historical Society at the time. Santa Barbara’s scroll garnered both financial support for the fledgling organization and public awareness of the project, explained the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society’s current museum curator, Cindy Ransick. While fewer than 100 people signed the Santa Barbara scroll, the Santa Maria founders scroll boasts more than 200 signatures.
“Now, that may not seem like a whole lot, but in a very short period of time, to gather over 200 or 250 people together in 1955, in a town that had a population closer to 7,000, that’s pretty good,” she said. “They loved their town and they were enormously proud of the way Santa Maria was growing, because in 1955 they were facing some pretty big growth.”
With talk of a new Air Force Base, a second high school, and considerable development planned, there was a call for a historical society to preserve the memory of the “old Santa Maria,” but the city didn’t get one until Santa Maria celebrated its bicentennial in 1955. Ethel-May Dorsey was asked to organize the Centennial Celebration, Ransick said, and she did so only on the condition that she also get city approval to found a historical society.
The support and push to document the valley’s history was found throughout the community, including from relative newcomers to the area like G. Allan Hancock, as well as longtime ranching and farming families whose names make up plenty of Santa Maria streets. There was also a desire to document the lives and experiences of the older generation of the time; the last of the folks born before the turn of the 20th century who were still living in the valley, Ransick said.
“They felt like a lot of the original pioneers were passing, and the chances and the opportunity to collect their stories were passing,” Ransick said. “One of the first projects the society did was to actually use reel-to-reels and interview some of the senior members of the community, the ones they called the pioneers. We call these people pioneers, and we’re talking about the folks they called pioneers.”
Today, with the museum commemorating its 60th, diamond anniversary, the society has created a new scroll to celebrate the society much in the same way the founders did, Ransick said. Members of the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society are welcome to come down to the museum and sign the new scroll, and anyone hoping to become a member is welcome to do so and sign as well.
“We feel much the same way they did,” Ransick said. “We’re experiencing a lot of people passing at this point; we’re running out of World War II veterans. We’re reaching a point where the generation is passing, so this is an opportunity to capture them as participants.”
Both scrolls made a rare trip outside the museum on Sept. 12 to the Santa Maria Public Library’s Shepard Hall, where the society’s monthly historical talks series, Valley Speaks, featured local author and historian R. Lawson Gamble, who spoke on the history of the Santa Maria Valley’s neighbor, Los Alamos.
Following the talk, members present lined up to sign the new scroll, including Glenn Battles, who remembers when the first scroll was created.
“The first scroll was actually developed by a classmate of mine’s parents,” Battles explained. “I went from first grade all the way through high school with Betty Taylor, and her mom and dad, Elizabeth and Don Taylor, are the ones that started the scroll. She did the graphic part of it, and he did the framing for it.”
Battles—whose great-grandfather came to the valley to homestead in 1868, growing peanuts, tomatoes, and beans—has spoken for previous Valley Speaks programs, which feature locals with personal or family experience in the subject they are relating. But this isn’t just the domain of locals like himself, Battles said, but of many Santa Marians.
“History’s been a part of our family just because we’ve been here so long, but then as I’ve become active in the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society, there are so many things I’ve talked to people about to get them involved, because they all have history too,” he said. “A lot of people in Santa Maria that have been here, even if they’re not a known family like the Millers, or the Thornburgs, or the Feslers, and Cook, and so forth, they have artifacts in their homes, and they need to bring those artifacts down to the Historical Society and scan it into the system to be a part of the permanent record.”
Many volunteers are happy to scan images of places, people, and things from Santa Maria Valley into the society’s database, and the museum is always welcoming to anyone with an artifact or documents that they can no longer keep. The museum warehouses a variety of local artifacts, which are rotated throughout the year in various exhibits.
The building was built on city-owned property in the early 1970s, Ransick said, with funds raised by museum members. The understanding was to co-house the city’s Chamber of Commerce at the same location but also finally provide the city with a physical space in which to house history. Having a museum is an important aspect of documenting and preserving history that yields discoveries and results anyone would be hard pressed to find otherwise, Ransick said.
Take the case of what happened two years ago, during the first half of 2013, when Ransick and other members discovered a number of scrapbooks in the back of the museum’s warehouse. The scrapbooks mostly consisted of the personal correspondence of Civil War-era lawyer Leonard Swett. Donated by the widower of Swett’s granddaughter, who lived in Santa Maria, the scrapbooks included handwritten letters to and from Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The so-called “Lincoln Letters” are a huge attraction each year around April when the museum showcases them.
The Lincoln Letters also dovetailed with the Museum’s latest book, penned by Ransick, titled An Historical Walk at the Santa Maria Cemetery: American Civil War Veterans, which includes information about the Lincoln Letters as well as the more than 40 Union and Confederate veterans buried in the Santa Maria Cemetery.
Alex Gryzwacki, a volunteer involved with the Santa Barbara Genealogical Society, Santa Barbara Historical Society, and Senior Vice Commander for the Sons of Union Veterans, was present at the recent Valley Speaks event and remarked that the new book is a great tool and asset for anyone interested in genealogy or Civil War history.
“Her book is probably one of the best I’ve ever seen, where you have all the data you need to do the research right in your own hand,” he said. “If you look in there and you have a relative in that book, you’re 90 percent there.”
An Historical Walk at the Santa Maria Cemetery: American Civil War Veterans, published through Janaway Publishing, includes photos of gravestones, portraits and photographs of the buried veterans, copies of original pension cards, and more images of flags flown and weapons used by the servicemen from both sides of the conflict.
The timing of the book coincides with the 60th anniversary of the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society, but also with the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Ransick explained. Membership drives like the scroll, and fundraising projects like the book, are great to promote around anniversaries, she said, especially when there is a greater historical context with which to connect.
“We’re a historical society, and anytime you have a round number of sorts, it’s a time when people pay more attention to it than any other time, because you also have a national drive and because 150 is a big number,” she said. “I wanted to make it a local event, and bring in the local context, because that’s what we do.”
To truly bring the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society full circle, and offer a fitting tribute to the original founders, the nonprofit organization has more than a scroll in the works. The original founders released the book This is Our Valley, Ransick explained, which has been reprinted six times since, and relates plenty of the valley’s history—even before it was known as Santa Maria. In tribute to that tome, the society is currently working on a full-size coffee table book titled Historic Santa Maria Valley.
To be released in collaboration with the Historical Publishing Network (HPN), Historic Santa Maria Valley will include color photos and large pages detailing much of the history released in This is Our Valley, as well as plenty that has happened since.
“We’re taking some of the old stuff and then we’re picking up the storyline and continuing it,” Ransick explained. “In some cases we give a complete history, but in some cases we go through the 1980s. In the case of women in politics, we will take you all the way from Sadie West, who served on the City Council in 1930 all the way to Alice Patino, who started on the council in 2000.”
Sales of the book, set to release in early 2016, will help support the museum, but that’s not the only way it will help raise funds, Ransick said. The first half of the book will include a comprehensive history of the valley penned by Ransick, but the second half will include tribute pages purchased with donations to the society. Local families and businesses are already planning their pages—which are edited and included at the society’s discretion—and more are welcome to contribute.
In this way, the book will relate the personal side of the Santa Maria Valley and its vast and colorful history. That’s the role of any good historical society, Ransick explained, to not just preserve, but engage a community with its own history.
“Part of it is, you don’t really know what is history when you’re living it yourself,” she said. “You’re not really thinking, ‘Wow, this is a big day,’ or, ‘This is really important.’”
The Santa Maria Valley Historical Society and Museum is brimming with membership that recognizes the importance of history, and most members are ready to share it. While Ransick works on research for the new book and meets with locals looking to refine their page in Historical Santa Maria Valley, volunteers scanning images, accepting donations, and leading tours surround her.
For many members of the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society, their greatest contribution comes from the stories they get to share with visitors, contextualizing the collection of artifacts there and revealing the life that was happening at any given time.
For Bill Wurth (pictured on cover), a World War II veteran who first moved to Santa Maria in 1956 to work at John Englis Frozen Foods, his favorite part of the museum to show is the G. Allan and Marian Hancock room, as he was actually friends with the Hancocks. He especially enjoys telling Allan Hancock College students about the man, offering a number of anecdotes that reveal the personality of the famous Santa Marian, whether it was his skill for water witching or how he traveled in style, whether by land, air, or sea.
“He was a wonderful pilot, and one of the planes he had was the Lockheed Hudson Lodestar, which was the civilian model of the bomber I flew in WWII,” he said. “I told him, one time that I was in there, that we sure didn’t have a bar in our plane, that’s for sure. He had a wet bar in there, and he would really entertain you when you flew in his plane.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 24 – Oct 1, 2015.