‘Sonoma County Stories,’ new Museum of Sonoma County exhibit, explores history through storytelling

For Flora Lee Ganzler, Saturday’s opening of the Museum of Sonoma County’s new permanent, interactive exhibition — “Sonoma County Stories” — spoke directly to three of her previous roles and one she still occupies.

“Do you know kvelling?” said Ganzler, a former docent of the museum, a former Rancho Cotate High School history teacher, a former member of the county’s Commission on Human Rights, and a current 50-year county resident.

“I’m kvelling,“ she said, using the Yiddish term for feeling enormous happiness and pride.

The $1.2 million exhibit is built around interviews recorded by former Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron and also includes dozens of pieces from the museum’s collections. It is intended to deliver a history of Sonoma County that is deeper and more rooted in an at-times overlooked local diversity of people and experiences, starting with that of the region’s first Native American inhabitants.

Viewing the county in a broader cultural and geographic context, in a way that incorporates many stories from people heretofore less widely heard from, touched her and made her proud of the museum, Ganzler said.

“It’s inclusion, not exclusion,” she said.

Officials, prior to a ceremonial ribbon cutting on the steps of the 1910 Post Office building that houses the museum, noted that the exhibition had its seeds in discussions of more than 15 years ago, started in earnest in 2019, carried on through the pandemic, and required the museum to largely close for most of the past year.

“It was a little bit of an exercise of keeping the faith,” said Eric Stanley, the museum’s associate director and history curator.

“At its heart was a simple idea really, that most of us understand our history and the place we are in, our community, not through academic history or big history books, but by sharing stories, an exercise that is intrinsically human,” Stanley said.

He cited as “perhaps the model story for our project,” Song Wong Borbeau, who was born in 1909 in what once was Santa Rosa’s Chinatown along Second Street east of Santa Rosa Avenue. Borbeau, whom LeBaron interviewed, died in 1996.

"It was an important interview that really captured and preserved important memories of this place and an important, very important, story. The museum's collection of objects from what was Santa Rosa's Chinatown came from Song. And now all those elements, the interview, the objects, those stories, have all come together and are part of what we're doing here,“ Stanley said.

He said the exhibition is not “static” but will continue to grow as new interviews and other elements are incorporated.

Later, as guests milled around the museum, Nancy Wang, president of the Redwood Empire Chinese Association, put her hand over her heart when asked what the exhibit might have meant to Borbeau.

“I think she will be laughing, maybe,” said Wang, who knew Borbeau. “Finally, it's happened. You know, somebody noticed the Chinese here. That's the way we feel, too. You know, we live here.”

The exhibition, as its collection of stories grows as it is meant to, can help illuminate the county’s past, present and future, said Santa Rosa Mayor Natalie Rogers.

“We work here. We play here. I just don't know that people know a lot of the history about how we got where we are today and how rich Sonoma County's history really, truly is,” Rogers said. “And I think that them being open to changing and evolving is great. That's what we need, right?”

The new exhibit occupies the museum’s mezzanine, where visitors can wander past displays that travel through eras including the invasion of Native American societies, the post-World War II growth of the county’s Black community, 1960s counterculture, the booming timber industry years of the late 1800s, and the 2017 firestorms.

Central to the exhibit is a listening station where headphones are donned to listen to conversations conducted by LeBaron and other interviewers with people ranging from George Ortiz, founder of California Human Development Corp., to Jesse Love, a founder of the Community Baptist Church and the first Sonoma County chapter of the NAACP, to vintner Allan Hemphill, who witnessed and joined the county’s renaissance as a fine wine region.

Digital screens that proved technologically problematic on Saturday meant that certain key exhibition components were unavailable.

Among those: curated histories of South Park, the Santa Rosa neighborhood that was a center of the county’s Black community, Japanese American residents and their World War II incarceration, and the Bracero program, which brought Mexican men legally to the U.S. starting in 1942 on short-term farm and ranch labor contracts.

As he and some friends enjoyed the exhibition, Emilio Rodriguez-White, a Santa Rosa Junior College student from Las Vegas, recommended also incorporating younger generations into it as it evolves — as visitors, participants and designers.

“It’s those younger people who are going to be telling those stories, you know, as they grow. And so to include young people in it really helps to preserve that history and show that it matters,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay

Editor’s note: The Press Democrat is a financial sponsor of the exhibit.