A few years ago, before I started working at the museum, I was wandering around Old Town and I stopped by to visit the Clarke Museum. I checked out the Main Hall and went into Nealis Hall, where I was faced with literally hundreds of baskets of all shapes, sizes, and colors. I walked through the exhibits but when I walked out, I felt like how one feels when they are walking through a forest that they aren't familiar with and someone asks them what kind of plants they saw. I once heard a professor somewhere over at HSU refer to a similar feeling as experiencing the "green blur" while driving down the road.

I knew I saw baskets, but the sheer numbers made it hard to comprehend what I had seen. It wasn't until I started working at the Museum and started learning more about the collections that I began to see the things that made not only different types of baskets different from one another, but recognizing individual baskets. I've come to a much greater appreciation and understanding of the baskets through learning more about them and their regional importance. Of course, there's always more to learn about them, their makers, and the context of their creation and use.

So here's a handy basic identification guide for the next time you come in the museum or visit another one of our local museums that has basketry on display. Keep in mind these are general guidelines- weavers definitely do new things with time, inspiration, and the influence of external forces so there are baskets out there that don't fit into the general identification criteria.

It crosses my mind about once a week how it would be absolutely great to go on a road trip. Gas is cheap, the weather is getting nicer - and then I remember that there's a pandemic and we all need to stay home to get this thing over with. So this week, I went through the archives and looked for some things relating to the World's Fair and Humboldt County's presence in three of them. Humboldt County made a showing in these fairs to help promote tourism and travel to the region as travel became easier, safer, and faster.

​The World’s Fair, now oftentimes referred to as World Expo, is commonly said to have started in 1851, when the United Kingdom hosted “The Great Exhibition” which showed off the manufacturing prowess of the United Kingdom at the time. People from across the country and around the world came to this and future expositions to learn about new advancements, different cultures (although oftentimes the cultural exhibits were racially biased and skewed), and new places. Humboldt County shows up in at least three Expositions: The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the Columbian Exposition), the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.

​The fair opened May 1, 1893 and closed October 30, 1893 and took place at Jackson Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. Each state had its own building that housed exhibits- California’s was a 3 story Mission-style building that was the second largest in the fair after Illinois. The State sent 156 train car loads to Chicago to fill the display. Like all of the buildings built for this exposition and many buildings in other expositions, the buildings were made to be temporary. For the Humboldt County exhibit, the organizers got $5500 from the Board of Supervisors and local businesses, which totals to about $155,000 in today’s money. County residents Frank A Wick and John Dolbeer of Steam Donkey fame, nominated fellow resident Martha Herrick to lead the exhibit setup.

​Herrick was born December 11, 1841 in South Bend, Indiana. Family history traces her lineage back to a Brigadier-General who helped George Washington sign treaties with local tribes. Martha went to St. Mary’s College. She arrived in California in 18589 via Panama to visit a sick brother and married Rufus F. Herrick in San Jose the following year. Her husband worked with local native people. According to Leigh Irvine, who wrote a biography on Herrick along with dozens of other notable Humboldt County Citizens in 1915, Mrs. Herrick and her husband “together... did much for the red men, treating them with kindness and consideration, protecting their rights and at all times according them justice and fair treatment” and were given the “most of the wonderful collection of Indian relics”. 

​Mrs. Herrick was well known for her knowledge on local tribes and according to Irvine,

​“ received gold and silver medals from the Anthropological Societies of the United States and England for her knowledge of the lost arts of the Indians. She is the author of a treatise on the habits and customs of the Indians of Humboldt county (extracts from which were published in the Ethnological Bureau of Smithsonian Institution), which is recognized as an authority on Indian sanitation. Another work along this line is now being compiled by her, its publication being eagerly awaited by those interested in Indian lore, Mrs. Herrick being recognized as the best authority on the history of the Indians in the Humboldt district, as well as on the general county history.”

​With those kinds of accolades, it’s no surprise that Dolbeer and Wick picked out Herrick to run the Humboldt County exhibit, as items from local Native people were popular display pieces at the time due to the prevailing assumption that local native cultures were on the cusp of disappearing completely across the country. Humboldt County of course was a hard place to travel to and these expositions provided a glimpse (granted a biased one towards the settler perspective) into the culture and lifestyles of the area.

​Herrick took up the job and with a full time assistant and part time assistant, constructed an exhibit in a 1300 foot space representing Humboldt County. Herrick wasn’t the only Humboldt County resident representing at the fair – A.W. Ericson was the fair’s official photographer.

​The exhibit brought the Humboldt county ‘wilderness’ to the Chicago fair, filling the space with taxidermied animals, ferns and other living local plants, rocks, native artifacts and displays of foods from the area, including “vegetables of unusual size”. Herrick was also able to secure one of Seth Kinman’s presidential Elk Antler chairs, whalebone chair, and Kinman’s famous mule skull fiddle. Herrick received an award for her exhibit and remained in Chicago through the duration of the fair leading tours and giving lectures.

​At the end of the fair, the money raised in the county had run out before Herrick had a chance to get her return ticket home, so she had to sell some of her collections she had brought with her to raise enough money. Some of the baskets sold because the base of the collection at the Field Museum. Herrick attempted to be reimbursed by the county for the money she had to spend to get back to Humboldt County, but the Supervisors denied her the money.

​In 1915, the World's Fair was hosted in San Francisco, under the title of the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The fair was to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and an opportunity for San Francisco to share their recovery from the devastating 1906 earthquake. 

​Humboldt County participated in a few different ways-

• There was a “Humboldt County Day” celebrating Humboldt County residents who descended on the fair en masse.
• Humboldt County also had an exhibit which included the redwood log that later became the Stump House and the Lentell Map which is now on display at the Clarke.
• A local Yurok  woman trained as a nurse in San Francisco led the parade the opening day of the Exposition. Her name was Bertha Thompson and the article discussing her, penned by Emma Freeman, made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

​The Humboldt County display contained images from Emma Freeman’s California Indian portrait series (which can be most easily found in Peter Palmquist’s With Natures Children), items representing Humboldt County’s incredibly diverse and plentiful agricultural industry, and images of the redwood forests. Souvenir books and pamphlets were also produced for these fairs lauding the natural, cultural, and industrial features of the area.

The following photos are glimpses into some of the booklets of images sold at the Exposition- cameras were not common features of the tourist outfit yet, so people purchased books, programs, and postcards to share views of the exposition with their friends and families back home. Click on the photos to view larger versions!

A promotional video for the World's Fair

Hi all!

This week, there will be a bit of a break in the blogging action while I work on researching a few more stories for the blog. Here's what is in store down the road.

​One of the things I’ve been looking at was how different museums are doing virtual tours of their exhibits during the closures from the virus. Everyone has a little bit of a different approach, from using Facebook live to Zoom and having a cohost to filming, processing, and posting. Some of the videos are just visitors wandering around and pointing out things they see and the title text on interpretive signs (in pre-closure days). I’ve been mulling over the idea of doing something like that for our Museum, as it brings the collections to our community, but also has the possibility of bringing collections  to the world. I’ve virtually toured the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office in Washington DC today and the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, CA near my home town, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the National Museum of Funeral History in Texas, and an art museum that had paintings of landscapes with modern additions like bridges and cars (I’m not a specialist in art, as you can tell). They all had different strengths and weaknesses, and everyone highlighted things differently. Some did a continual stream, others picked out specific items, it was all over the board.

As a museum professional and a person who likes visiting museums anyway, I want to encourage you: if you enjoy the content that any number of museums are offering right now, please send a few bucks their way or become a member! Some museums are extending memberships purchased now or prior to the epidemic to make up for lost time that the museum is closed. ​​

I wrote this post up a while back and thought I had posted it. Guess not! Well the timing couldn't be better. Let's talk about the history of Hospitals in Humboldt County. 

Someone could (and should) write a book on this topic, as hospitals in the county, and the medical field in general in Humboldt County, has a really colorful history. You've got household hospitals, traveling doctors, brotherly feuds, nuns, Unions and Union-busting employers, pandemics, early insurance (more interesting than it sounds), evolving medical practices, treatments, and more. Of course, like most aspects of our area's history, it was colored by the fact that we're a rural, hard to get to area.

Here's a taste of that history.

As Humboldt County’s population continued growing with the industrial boom of turn of the century United States, growing towns needed medical care for a variety of illnesses and unpredictable events that came their way, particularly injuries in the variety of industries here.

It may be surprising, when comparing the hospitals of yesteryear to the hospital of now, that there were, at one point in time, four hospitals operating in the Eureka-Arcata area in the first and second decades of the 20th century. The population of the county in 1900 was around 27,000 individuals, with the number rising to 37,000 by 1920. There were loggers, miners, families, industrialists, and Humboldt county was a bustling place to live. It was also a very dangerous place to live, partially due to it still being a frontier area and the lack of workplace safety regulations.

The trouble came to a boiling point while Charles was hosting a surgery with spectators and Curtis claimed that Charles was using the opportunity to brag about his work. Charles replied that Curtis should buy the hospital and he could run things his way- Charles would even come up with a purchase price for his brother. All this happened while there was a patient on the table anesthetized for surgery. I'm sure an anesthesiologist (if there was one) was sweating nearby.

A few weeks later, Charles approached Curtis with a purchase price for his share of the hospital, and Curtis claimed that his brother had settled on that number because he knew it was too high and Curtis would turn it down. Next thing you know, Curtis takes Charles down by grabbing him by the throat and throwing him to the ground and knocks Charles out, sending him to the hospital. Curtis then severs ties with his brother’s hospital.

​A few years later, in 1918, Curtis caught typhoid and his brother, Charles, took care of him in the hospital. Once Curtis had recovered, the two brothers then worked on patients who had caught the famous Spanish Flu, an epidemic that wreaked havoc on Eureka. Charles’ hospital stayed open during the outbreak, and only closed when both Charles and Curtis and the matron and assistant for the hospital signed up to join the US Army Medical Corps in November of 1918 and were sent to France

When the brothers returned after their service, they operated independent practices and did not reopen the Northern California Hospital, which ended up changing hands in 1920.

​Around the same time that Northern California Hospital had taken root, the Union Labor Hospital opened in 1906, which was the first pre-paid health plan in the United States. There was a movement around this time to unionize loggers and other timber workers by the IWW (International Workers of the World, whose members were oftentimes known as Wobblys). 9 unions came together to open the Union Labor Hospital, initially at 5th and B. The organization was socialist oriented, and part of their movement was to open a hospital for the benefit of workers, initially only open to the 9 unions that founded the hospital but later included all unions. It was a hospital with 50 beds and initially supplied its own hospitals until later decades when it was open to the community- any doctor could bring their patients to the hospital to care for them. Payment was done through a ticket system. An individual would purchase a $10 ticket (which is about $280 in today’s market) that would offer complete coverage for the holder against sickness and accidents at work. Initially, these were only available to men, but eventually women and children could also purchase tickets and be cared for at the hospital. Additionally, the hospital was a nursing school that educated three generations of nurses during its operational days with classes supplemented with in hospital work. Most of these nurses remained at the hospital, ensuring a steady staff of available nurses to join the Hospital with the graduation of each class. The patients they cared for were mostly those affected by workplace accidents and excessive drinking.

Anti-Union sentiment battered the hospital in its early days- and barely a year after the hospital opened, a huge Union labor strike at a local mill led to the deaths of many of the strikers- but it stayed open and continued to serve patients, even in years when Union support waivered. Following the 1907 strike, employers of union workers required fees of $1 per month, which was used to pay into a fund for injured workers and allowed the worker to be treated at hospitals pre-chosen by the company, of which the Union Labor Hospital was excluded. A legal battle ensued, and temporarily the Union Labor Hospital was able to get an injunction to stop companies from charging workers the $1 per month fee, but it was later overturned in 1910. There were many workers, however, who paid the $1 fee required by their employer while also paying the $10 per year ticket for service at Union Labor Hospital and were cared for there rather than at the company- directed hospitals.

In 1918, when Curtis and Charles Falk were fighting the Spanish Influenza alongside numerous doctors and nurses, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange were chipping in to the cause by opening their Nazareth Academy to house the sick. Even though the sisters did not have medical training, they visited the sick in their homes and did what they could to help.

Once the Influenza epidemic drew to a close along with the Northern California Hospital as the Falks took off for France, Mother Bernard persuaded the city of Eureka to reopen the Northern California hospital. It was purchased for $20,000, which was paid through trading property. The Sisters were sent to medical training in San Francisco and to the Mayo Clinic for their medical training and returned to a reopened Northern California Hospital, whose name had been changed to St. Josephs. The hospital was to also be a training hospital and this location served the community until the Sisters built a new hospital on Dolbeer in 1954.

In 2000, after a little under a century in operation, General Hospital was also purchased by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.

Here's a handy-dandy-low-budget (i.e DIY by me) graphic showing the consolidation of hospitals and healthcare in Eureka/Arcata. Orange boxes note hospitals owned and operated by St. Josephs. You'll notice a hospital at the bottom of the graphic that I haven't mentioned... Stay posted for the story of the Trinity Hospital and Mad River Hospital.

We, in the larger history organization sense of the word, have journals, newspapers, letters and more from another life changing event -the 1918 epidemic. The journals and lettersgive us an inside look at the event from the view of people who lived through it, and a view into how the epidemic affected individuals and communities, while the papers give us a larger picture idea of what was going on. These resources have been used locally to write up articles on local responses to the 1918 epidemic, and these articles can be found over at the Historical Society. You can also read excerpts from a diary by someone who lived through the epidemic on their website, linked here. Their Facebook page has been very active through these events in sharing the steps local residents took to protect themselves and their community in 1918, some of which are similar to today. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing how archivists will be preserving all the art and culture that has been shared through digital means like Facebook Live videos during the pandemic, but that is a thing for another day. Now is the time to start creating that paper record of COVID-19 for future researchers. I wonder how many people are clipping newspaper articles, writing down their thoughts, and documenting how the world is changing around us as this event continues on. ​

​I grew up in San Diego (North County, the Vista-Oceanside area for those who are familiar with the area) and I remember getting ahold of the newspaper each day during the 2008 fires and hacking out photos and articles on the event. I didn’t include notes, just taped the articles into a scrapbook that is still at my parent’s house. I remember a picture taken during a flyover of a burned area - two cul-de-sacs in a cookie cutter neighborhood side by side, one circle had all its houses intact except one, and the other all of the homes except one had burned. I believe it was on the front page of the paper that particular day.

(Note: I wasn't paid to recommend any of these books! I purchased most if not all of them at local second hand stores or through eBay's used book section. If you use Amazon, pick us out on Amazon Smile when you order and we get some money from the sale with no extra cost to you!

Remodeling the case took removing the collection, shelving and layers of fabric and carpet inside the case. From there it took a few passes of sanding and scraping to get to where we could prime and paint the walls. 

135 years ago today, the Chinese population of Eureka was expelled following increased tensions and a flashpoint- the accidental shooting of Councilman Kendall. ​