Wisteria Cottage has been a fixture on Prospect Street in La Jolla for about 122 years. That’s not changing.
But the name of the institution that calls it home is.
“This is a 1904 cottage that was the home of Virginia Scripps, the half-sister of Ellen Browning Scripps,” said Lauren Lockhart, who leads what was the Historical Society. “This incredible property and the four structures on it were gifted to our organization by the Revelle family, descendants of the Scripps family.”
But Lockhart said feedback from visitors convinced her and the board of directors that a change was needed.
“Are people not visiting us or not discovering us because our name doesn’t reflect who we are and who we’ve evolved to be today? So, the board of directors and my team and I, we talk about this transition of the Museum of History and Culture, La Jolla, as our name catching up with our work,” said Lockhart, who’s now officially the Executive Director of the Museum of History and Culture La Jolla.
Their work continues on as before, primarily showcasing exhibitions that typically change every three to four months. When KPBS interviewed Lockhart for this story, they were featuring “Stories in Cloth, Communicating through Textiles.”
Lockhart described it as “a beautiful example of we’re looking at history, but in this instance, through textiles.”
Now on exhibit at the museum, “The Scientific Art of Historic Preservation, ” a fascinating conglomeration of pictures, story boards and artifacts, exploring the hidden processes behind saving historic places.
The museum describes it this way: “The exhibition invites visitors to see preservation not simply as restoration, but as discovery: peeling back layers of paint, wood, plaster, and history to better understand the people and ideas that shaped the built environment.”
Even for fans of historic architecture, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll learn things from this exhibit.
When you walk into the museum, just to your right, is a part of the museum that never changes. It’s called the History Portal.
Timelines on the walls accompany historic pictures. Think of it as a thumbnail introduction to what the Museum of History and Culture has to offer.
“We wanted to find a way to give people access to our historic collection and really have those materials at their fingertips. Because today, we have over 100 individuals on an annual basis who physically come to our site to conduct research and we offer that service free of charge," Lockhart said. "So, it’s really important that we both make strides to digitize those items and have this physical space that anyone who walks through our door could recognize what we have available to them.”
In its archives are fascinating things kept in a separate building down the hill from Wisteria Cottage. It's a smallish space holding items you’d expect like copies of the San Diego Union, long before it became the Union-Tribune. There are books on a Jacaranda Tree Planting Program, sitting on top of boxes containing documents from the Village Garden Club, and on one wall, a number of paintings.
“The paintings have all been digitized and catalogued. We had an intern focus solely on that last year,” said Lockhart.
There are also lots of recordings stored here; oral histories on all things La Jolla.
“And interestingly that was in a lot of different forms. As you can imagine, we’re a 62-year old organization so we had them on cassette tapes, CDs, thumb drives, a record in one instance and so it was really important to protect the integrity of those, that they all be digitized,” said Lockhart.
The enormous task of digitizing thousands of items is more than Lockhart and her staff of five can handle. Fortunately, they have help.
“We’ve been fortunate to have support from the Institute For Museum and Library Services hire paid college interns very meticulously document and catalogue everything included here and in the last year, we have uploaded the first 2,000 digitized objects," she said. "That’s a tiny fraction of the materials in our collection, but the goal is to digitize everything that we have and make that available to anyone.”
From the history of Wisteria Cottage itself, to the manifold ways it illuminates history and culture today, this museum is definitely worth checking out and - it’s always free!
