Historical Society Transforming Library Into New Headquarters

The Julian Historical Society will move its headquarters into the old library building.

By Bobbi Zane

A parade of box-laden Julian residents streaming into the former library signals the transformation of the facility into a new home of the Julian Historical Society.

When the new Julian library opened in September, the schoolhouse became available to the Historical Society, which has leased it from San Diego County to serve as permanent home to the town’s archives.

“We expect to move into the school and be open to the public by mid-spring,” said Jan Mattias, former president of the Historical Society who is busy organizing the box-moving project to what will be called the Julian Historical Society at Witch Creek School. It will serve as an administrative office and repository for the society’s archive collection and hold displays of historic items donated by local families.

When it opens to the public, the school will join three other buildings in Pioneer Park that illustrate Julian’s gold-rush era history. These include the Pioneer Museum, the adjacent Grosskopf House and Transportation viewing museums. The Transportation museum houses the historic Mack stage. Construction of walkways connecting the facilities is already under way.

The historical society has big plans for its new headquarters, according to Mattias. “We will hold our regular monthly speaker programs there. We will open a gift shop and hope to offer docent tours of the historic areas of town starting from our office.”

Once the move is complete, society members and interested volunteers will embark on the process of cataloguing the archives. These include maps, old newspapers, printed materials, photos, journals kept by local families, family histories and minutes of society board meetings dating back to 1964. Local residents concerned about preserving Julian’s history have cared for these records for years; now they will be stored safely in one location and available for researchers, writers and family historians.

The new use of the school will complete a circle of uses dating from the time it was donated to the historical society by members of the Sawday family in the late 1960s. The 1,200-square-foot schoolhouse originally was located on the property now known as the Star Ranch. It served area children from 1888 to 1954, when it was closed.

After a period of deterioration, in 1970 the classic Victorian one-room schoolhouse was moved to Julian, where title was transferred to San Diego County with the intent of using it as a combination library and museum. But when it arrived here, it had to be renovated. The Historical Society raised about $8,000 to put it into shape.

“Originally, we had an old pot-bellied stove, a teacher’s desk and the children’s desks inside,” Mattias recalled. As time went on and the library needed more space for books, some of the historic items were removed and replaced by bookshelves.

“Now those items are going back into the schoolhouse,” she said. And the public and visitors will get a view of what life was like here more than a century ago.