The museum, though small, is big on information and
interesting sights and offers new, temporary exhibits periodically throughout
the year, such as the Dairies of the Valley exhibit now being showcased.
“There were 13 dairies here at one time before the grapes
took over,” Executive Director Chris Bashforth says
of the exhibit, which opened June 7 with a special milk-and-cookies party and
featuring a live cow.
The museum is a series of themed rooms circling a
beautiful courtyard garden, which is often used for weddings or other events,
and sits next to the large carriage house.
The Parks-Janeway Carriage
House was built in 1978 and holds a great collection of buggies, stage coaches
and other horse-drawn vehicles, including a popcorn coach and an eerie hearse,
which resembles the one outside Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
The carriage house is one of Bashforth’s
favorite parts of the museum, and though she says the museum itself is not
exclusively a Western museum, it does preserve the Old West, especially with
the carriage house.
Nowadays, she says, kids are so into electronics and the Internet, they often don’t know much about the Old West and
are excited by seeing real stage coaches in person.
“It’s the most stages in the Western United States under
one roof,” she says as she shows off the collection.
The museum had a symposium on the collection in April, in
which some of today’s leading historians and coach experts agreed it’s one of
the best collections in this part of the country. You don’t have to be an
expert, though, to see how excited kids get by the coaches. A family touring
the Carriage House had their arms full with two squealing kids running up and
down and asking questions about the coaches.
Since there isn’t much of a barrier, other than a rope,
museum goers can get right up close to look at the coaches. Since she started at the museum four years
ago, Bashforth says she has learned a lot — and
continues to do so. She says she learned the phrase “riding shot gun” really
means the person who would ride in the front of a coach with a gun to defend
it. And, she adds, for a horse-drawn vehicle to be a coach, it has to have an
enclosed seating area.
“Betcha didn’t know that!” she
says, laughing.
Transportation in general is a huge part of the valley’s
history, she says. The stage coach lines and Pacific Coast Railway line
contributed to the valley’s growth, and when the big Southern Pacific Railroad
was continued along the coast instead of through the valley, the valley
community ceased its rapid growth.
The museum has a large working miniature train model. The
scenery around it includes Mattei’s Tavern, the train
station and Los Olivos in the early 1900s. The
primary builder, Ken Kelley, says the presentation is quite authentic, save
some changes made to allow the track to run in a circle, and it is scaled to
1/48 the actual size. The train was supposed to be a temporary exhibit, but its
popularity gave it a permanent place in the museum.
“The draw was to try to improve the museum besides
appealing to more than just horse people or saddle people or stage coach
people,” Kelley says, an admitted train person.
Another appeal of the model train is the push button that
makes it run. Kelley says one of his favorite childhood memories was pushing a
button at a museum that made a stuffed rattle snake rattle. Kids love being
involved and pushing buttons to make the train run.
Bashforth
calls the model train a “labor of love” since it took Kelley and multiple
volunteers more than 1,000 hours of work to create. It’s tied with the carriage
house as her favorite exhibit, she decides.
Kelley, who loves the history behind the trains as well,
recalls a tale about robbers who killed the train station master in Los Olivos in the early 1900s. Apparently, the townsfolk
clamored to hang the murderers from a huge oak tree, and the constable, in an
attempt to bring them to trial first, hid the robbers in Mattei’s,
dressed them in women’s clothes and then snuck them back to Santa Barbara in
disguise. That same oak tree still grows in Los Olivos
and is represented in the model train setup.
Other exhibits in the museum include American Indian
artifacts, histories behind the five valley towns of Los Olivos,
Santa Ynez, Ballard, Solvang and Buellton, historical costumes display, and
even the original jail cell from Faraday Street in Santa Ynez.
The goal of the museum, Bashforth
says, is to honor the history and life of the entire valley from the 1880s
through the 1950s in a fun and interesting way, and the museum is always
striving for ways to improve.
The museum currently does not receive too many visitors,
about 15 every day, but the artifacts are fun, and the sparse attendance gives
visitors a more intimate connection with the history.
The museum has several upcoming functions such as an ice
cream social and the Valley Pioneer Jamboree Dinner and Auction to raise money
for the nonprofit.
On history, Bashforth says, “We
live it,” and says it’s important to chronicle and preserve the ranch, dairy,
art, Danish, mission and Indian cultures that make up the valley.
“We have got a rich history here, and my goal would be to
see this become more interpretive,” she says.
With school out and costly family vacations on the
downturn, the Santa Ynez Valley Historical Museum might just be worth a visit
when looking for local activities fit for the family.
Reach Lauren Crecelius at
lcrecelius@syvjournal.com