Point Reyes Light- October 29, 1998
Long-awaited Tomales history center opens
After nearly eight years of planning, Tomales Regional History Center volunteers will finally hold a ribbon-cutting on Sunday, Nov. 8, when the new center will open its doors.
Up to now, the volunteers have used their scissors to perform the often-thankless task of historical preservation: snipping newspaper articles, trimming old photos, and cutting out obituaries.
"Basically, we have preserved family histories, biographies, photographs, and cemetery records to make it easy for anyone to come in and do research on their genealogy or find out what was going on at a certain time," said History Center president Lois Parks of Tomales.
The grand opening will begin at 1 p.m. and will feature the museum's newest old stuff. Visitors can meet the History Center's board of directors - and a few hundred Tomales High alumni, who have been invited to take a new look at their old stomping grounds.
For the History Center is located in the gym of old Tomales High, which changed campuses in 1969.
The history center highlights the cultural history of West Marin from Valley Ford and Bloomfield south to Tocaloma and the Point Reyes peninsula, Parks said.
"We've focused our attention on all the towns that sent their kids to Tomales High, which was built in 1912," she added. "Before World War II, there were 24 grammar schools in the district, and most of them were one-room school houses. The kids rode to the high school on the narrow-gauge railroad, before the first school bus started running around 1917."
However, the area around Tomales High had an colorful history while there were still far further elementary schools, she said.
Miwok Indians fished and hunted for centuries in valleys that became home to Irish settlers in the 1850s. Immigrants from Switzerland and Italy arrived soon thereafter, followed by some from Portugal. Their descendants today dominate West Marin agriculture.
(Humans, nonetheless, have played only a brief role in the region's overall history; as a reminder of this, an ancient rock from the Pleistocene-Pliocene Era has been placed in the middle of the history center's exhibition room.)
The history center is a surviving relic: it outlasted the fire that in 1977 razed part of the old high school. Somehow it has managed to retain its distinctive exterior "from the old, cheap-green paint era of the 1950s," said regional history program chairwoman Kathie Lawson.
Lawson, who graduated from Tomales High in 1943, said that the old gym wasn't always an eyesore. Originally, it was painted beige - and will be again - thanks to a recent donation from Dillon Beach resident Catherine Bevenda.
The interior glows, thanks to newly painted walls and polished hardwood floors. Decorative tapestries painted by Tomales artist and Light cartoonist Katherine LeMieux Armstrong hang above display cases.
A collection of Miwok arrowheads dominates one corner; a mannequin wearing a red Tomales Braves letter jacket stands demurely in another.
The history center's 350 volunteers have raised most of the money needed to restore most the gym; however, the downstairs area needs a makeover, Lawson said.
In order to raise funds to build a meeting room, kitchenette, restrooms, and some storage space, volunteers are now launching a capital-fund drive, she said.
Meantime, she added, they're happy that the historic memorabilia they've collected over the years has finally found a permanent home.
"I think it's fun to watch people come in the door here and be delighted with local history," Parks said. "It gives me a lot of pleasure seeing people get pleasure."
After the grand opening, the museum will be open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons beginning in January.