How will the Sonoma County Archives be kept safe?

Tens of thousands of priceless records illuminating Sonoma County history back to the mid-1800s rest in a timeworn warehouse that officials and advocates agree is woefully inadequate for protection of fragile, irreplaceable material.

Adding urgency to an issue that has recently percolated without much public attention is the location of the Sonoma County Archives at the Los Guilicos complex off Highway 12 in east Santa Rosa, a site twice overrun by wildfires.

The 3,800-square-foot structure built in the 1950s, with a concrete floor and leaky metal roof, barely escaped harm from the Nuns fire that came within 440 feet in 2017 and a harrowing repeat by the Glass fire that edged even closer last September, causing $8 million in damage at the Los Guilicos site.

“It’s a horrible location,” said Steven Lovejoy of Sebastopol, chairman of the Sonoma County Historical Records Commission, an advisory panel. “It’s sort of like out of sight, out of mind.”

But the archives, which are not open to the public or shown on Google Maps, have a devoted following among people who appreciate history and the importance of the archives in documenting the past.

The warehouse, once part of the kitchen at the Los Guilicos school for delinquent girls, holds more than 40,000 historic photographs, records of deeds and mortgages, voter registrations, business licenses, adoption records from 1927-1945, four boxes of hospital records from the 1930s and ’40s, and much more.

“It can tell us how those who lived here before us made their way through the world,” said Dan Markwyn of Santa Rosa, a Sonoma State University history professor emeritus.

Several Sonoma County residents asked The Press Democrat to query county leaders about what’s being done to protect the archives. The questions came in as part of the newspaper’s North Bay Q&A series, which collects and answers readers’ questions about life in the region.

The questions about the archives came in after Gaye LeBaron’s January column about the history-rich but fire-imperiled site.

The looming onset of another fire season in a county where wildfires scorched about 125,000 acres and destroyed about 500 homes last year has magnified the need for action.

“Urgency is the word I would use,” said Supervisor Susan Gorin, who lost her Oakmont home in the 2017 Nuns fire.

Gorin toured the archives with Katherine Rinehart, then the county archivist, after that fire and “discovered the treasure trove there,” she said.

“I realized immediately the archives were vulnerable and need to be preserved in the right facility,” Gorin said, initially assuming there was plenty of time to act.

After the 67,000-acre Glass fire last fall forced 30,000 people to evacuate, “it became a more immediate issue,” she said.

Deborah Doyle, the Sonoma County Library Commission chair, noted at last week’s meeting that fire season may start earlier this year.

“The quicker we can move things out of what seems to be a fire magnet … the better for all concerned,” she said.

An assessment by the California Preservation Program in 2018 found the warehouse lacked proper environmental controls for long-term archival storage, was in a mudslide zone, and was at risk from wildfires with an automatic fire suppression system that “would not protect the archives from destruction,” Rinehart reported in a blog last year.

Rinehart retired from the Sonoma County Library in February 2020, after nearly 18 years as a library associate and eventually manager of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library, a job that included supervision of the archives.

She and Lynn Downey, a western historian and consulting archivist who has worked in the Sonoma County Archives, are co-chairs of Advocates for the Sonoma County Archives, a 10-member citizens group pushing for relocation, improved management and access to the archives.

But moving some 5,000 cubic feet of records — boxes, bound volumes, photographs, oversized maps and drawings that have filled the warehouse to capacity — is a costly proposition, with no clear source of funds.

“We are looking forward to the county stepping forward because most of the material is theirs,” Doyle said at the meeting. “It is not the library’s responsibility to move all those things out of Los Guilicos. It’s expensive; it’s not appropriate.”

Commissioner Paul Heavenridge said, “It really seems this is not our records and that the county should take the majority of the burden in paying for this … helping (to) find a more secure location.”

Ann Hammond, director of the Sonoma County Library, said the question of whether the library could spend proceeds from Measure Y, a one-eighth-cent sales tax approved by voters in 2016, on the archives was under review by the commission’s lawyer.

“I believe the answer is murky at best,” she said.

Doyle said the library has no staff archivists and that managing the archives “is not going to be part of our future.”

Hammond said in an interview there was “no consensus” on the board regarding Doyle’s comment.

“I want to partner with the county on this and find a solution that works for both of us,” she said at the meeting.

Rinehart said her group wants the library, county and interested citizens to collectively work on ways to protect the archives and make them available to the public.

Lovejoy, who is also president of the Sonoma County Genealogical Society, said the library evidently doesn’t want responsibility for the archives and the county doesn’t want to spend much money on it.

“The records are really left as an orphan,” he said.

Hammond disputed his assertion, noting the commission spent $137,000 in surplus Measure Y funds on a staff assessment and repackaging of some of the archive’s most valuable materials that could be done this month.

The commission also asked the county for $140,000 to pay for a comprehensive inventory, continued repackaging and relocation of about 10% of the material to the History & Genealogy Library for temporary storage before September, she said.

The history library is located next to the Central Santa Rosa Library at Third and E streets.

Gorin said she expects the supervisors to approve the expense, adding that archived materials must be “available to the community” and not simply stacked in a storage space.

The archives at Los Guilicos, a stone’s throw from the historic Hood Mansion, are not open to the public. On requests from the public, archived records are brought to the history and genealogy library for use only on the premises.

The “best investment we can make” is digitizing the archives and putting them all online, Gorin said. It’s a “heavy lift” financially, she said, with no cost estimate currently in hand.

Hammond said she has discussed the idea with Gorin and pointed out the cost, as well as the fact that digitizing, in most cases, is not meant to replace the historic material.

Online copies afford quick and easy access, but historians and archivists rely on the ability to examine original documents.

“Doing history means answering questions,” said Markwyn, with records of land transfers, surveys, maps and road construction often yielding information no other source can provide and still in use today for settling legal disputes and questions.

In her blog, Rinehart said the archives are “chockablock with fascinating material” from old records of police arrests, monthly reports from the county jail and police court docket minutes.

Lovejoy was organizing an uncatalogued box labeled “Bonds of Public Oaths” when he came across documentation of the appointment of trustees for the African American Methodist Episcopal Union Church of Petaluma dated May 18, 1869.

The archives include documents in Spanish dating back to the 1840s, prior to statehood.

Matthew Gardner Kelly, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, sent a letter to the Library Commission recounting his research at the archives as a Stanford University graduate student in 2016.

School district boundary records dating back to the 19th century proved invaluable for his research, enabling him to understand “how Americans have imagined the role of public schools in California and the nation,” he wrote.

If those and other records are lost, “the knowledge they contain can never be regained. They will simply vanish for eternity.”

Hammond, the library director, said she appreciates the esteem for the archives revealed by the controversy.

“There are some people who are very passionate about this subject,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.