Gaye LeBaron: Reams of history, and a threat of fire for Sonoma County archives

There is a quote from “The Tempest” engraved on the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., where the documents that have shaped our government are kept.

It says “The past is prologue,” which is certainly something to think about in the here and now — “here” meaning Sonoma County, California, and “now” because the documents that constitute our county’s history are … I guess “endangered” is one possible term for the situation.

You may have read a letter to Let the Public Speak two Sundays ago about Sonoma County’s archives. It was a call for action to prevent a disaster of historical proportions — in the true sense of those two words.

The letter writer was Carol Eber, a retired educator who lives in Petaluma. The county archives she wrote about — an estimated 3,600 bound volumes, 2,200 storage boxes, 300 linear feet of oversized drawings and maps, eight linear feet of glass negatives, 60,000 prints and negatives, including aerials, stored in file cabinets, hundreds of bound and unbound newspapers — are rapidly becoming a “capital I Issue” for county government.

Some of these documents are in Spanish, dating to the 1830s and ‘40s when what is now a county was La Frontera del Norte, Mexican California’s upper edge.

There is no engraved Shakespeare quote on the building where they are stored — and that’s all they are — “stored.” There’s no archivist on hand to greet you. You will have to have arrange the visit in advance and, trust me, you will be “underwhelmed” by the presentation of these treasures. There’s no museum lighting or display cases here.

The boxes and books and file cabinets fill a 1940s structure that was used as the kitchen for Los Guilucos School for Girls, a state institution where — in the terms of the time — “female juvenile delinquents” served their court-prescribed terms.

Bound by the 200-word limit, Eber didn’t have space for a full explanation of why she has more than a passing interest in those archives and the very real threat they face. She is a seventh-generation Californian whose Sonoma County roots reach back to the 1840s to a British ship’s carpenter named William Marcus (Mark) West and his wife, Guadalupe Vasquez. Mark West’s original land grant to Rancho San Miguel —including, in today’s world, Mark West Creek, Mark West Springs, Larkfield, all of Fountaingrove and more — is somewhere in those archives.

The building is temperature-controlled and secure, the records relatively safe — if you don’t count the growing danger of wildfires. The last two that have threatened that Highway 12 area have come just three years apart and far too close for historical comfort. The most recent, last fall’s Glass fire, burned down from the mountains, doing an estimated $8 million in damage to the county-owned Los Guilucos campus, burning from the slopes to Highway 12. Three years earlier flames of the Tubbs fire came within 400 feet of the structure sheltering these treasures.

It’s the fire danger that Eber calls out in her letter. And her message is clear. “It’s time to relocate the archives to preserve and protect them,” she wrote, “… a better location must be found.”

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The letter was clearly a call to action. It was a plea to county officials to “put it on their agenda and take action before the next wildfire.” She called out the administration of the county library and the library commission as well as the place where the decisions are made, the Board of Supervisors.

None of the above have responded to Eber’s call for action. But there is action nonetheless. There is a newly formed committee — Advocates for the Sonoma County Archives (ASCA). Eber, who serves as chairman of the board for the county’s Regional Parks Foundation is a member.

Katherine J. Rinehart and Lynn Downey are co-chairs and just that news should put officials on alert.

Rinehart, a familiar face and name to the history community here, was the most recent county archivist, serving in that capacity until her resignation as head of the library’s extensive History and Genealogy collection. (Neither of her vacated positions have been filled.)

She is also former chair of the county’s Historical Records Commission and current chair of the Heritage Network.

Lynn Downey is a Sonoma Valley resident who worked for 25 years as archivist at Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, the author of regional histories as well as a popular biography of Strauss, “The Man who Gave Blue Jeans to the World.” She is currently editor of the Sonoma Historian, the journal of the county historical society. As a consulting archivist she is not only familiar with the country archives but has worked with the Charles M. Schulz Museum and the Schulz Library at Sonoma State University and the Tomales Regional History Center.

The other advocates, including letter-writer Eber, are active in the county’s historical societies (and there seems to be one at every crossroads.) Some are specialists — in genealogy, architectural history, or preservation of photographs. Most are active in the Heritage Network and some are members of the Historical Records Commission.

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The year is young and so is ASCA, but members are already on the march. They were on the agenda at the first library commission meeting of the new year, where their presentation, including significant comments from interested citizens, drew no official response — and not much unofficial. There is no announced plan from library director Ann Hammond to appoint a new archivist. Presumably, the title is hers until she appoints another.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s hard to know who exactly is in charge of a locked building that sits in the path of future fires and bulges with history. The Board of Supervisors passed that baton to the library in 1965, when the downtown library building on E Street was state-of-the-art new and the courthouse in the middle of the square, where EVERYthing county-related resided, was crumbling toward destruction in the coming year.

It all comes back to funding, of course. Should there be a study to be certain that everything there is of value? Who’s going to pay for that? And who will pay for the move, even if they can find a place to move to?

Alas, history has always been preserved “on the wings of angels.”

But how do you put a value, in dollars and cents, on an archive? Ask that question inside that impressive building in Washington, D.C., that stores the national “prelude.”

Or ask Joyce Sayed, a veteran in Sonoma County government, from the first records and information manager in the 1970s to her current role as a consultant.

Currently chair of the county’s Historical Records Commission, Sayed shares Eber’s and ASCA’s concerns, calling them “voices of sanity.” She knows how vital the legal documents are to business at hand, but she also bears witness to the importance of the archives for people like Eber, whose family history must be safely preserved.

Sayed suggests that, first and foremost, the urgent need for a safe haven for the archives is preservation of “history reduced to its basic form. “It’s the Henry Louis Gates Jr. thing, “she says,”citing the TV professor who guides famous people to their family stories.“Those aren’t dead old papers, they are bits and pieces of our DNA. That’s what history is.”

Sadly, bits and pieces are flammable.