Today is Indigenous Heritage Day, a day for remembering the indigenous civilization living here in San Diego County thousands of years before Europeans arrived. The following two links offer further info into the movement by which the descendants of our county’s original residents have reasserted their historical legacy and assumed agency over their history and their future.
The first is a link to the resolution adopted by San Diego State University in 2019, acknowledging the legacy of the university’s site as Kumeyaay land:
And this is the link to the website of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at California State University San Marcos. If you go to the site and then click on “Land Acknowledgement”, you’ll see an explanation of the agreement acknowledging the Cal State site’s legacy as “the traditional territory of the Luiseño/Payómkawichum people.”
As part of a recent research trip for new history talk subjects, the San Diego History Seeker team visited Mount Hope Cemetery. Founded in 1871, Mount Hope is the only active city-owned and operated cemetery in the county. As such it is the burial place for numerous well-known figures in San Diego history, including Alonzo Horton and Elisha Babcock. It’s also the final resting place for many local citizens, whose lives contain stories connecting personal as well as national history.
There is a section in Mount Hope devoted to the members of the GAR. That stands for Grand Army of the Republic, which was the organization of the veterans of the Union forces in the U.S. Civil War. Founded in 1866, the GAR grew to include thousands of local posts across the nation. It existed until 1956, dissolving shortly after the death of its last member.
Among the hundreds of grave markers in Mount Hope’s GAR section is that of Isaac Barrett, shown below:
It’s a small, modest stone and like many it took a little effort to clear off from overgrown shrubbery. But it revealed that Isaac had fought as a member of an army unit in Minnesota. And his birth year of 1847 indicated he had to have been very young when he enlisted. Further checking revealed that he was mustered into Company E of the First Minnesota Heavy Artillery in 1865, which would have made him around 16 or 17 years old. He survived the war and returned to his then-home state of Minnesota. There he married Louisa Lacocq in 1871 and started a family.
Isaac would live in Minnesota until 1910, when, in his early 60s, he would join the ranks of west coast transplants and move to San Diego County, settling in National City, where he would live out his life until his death at the age of 75 in 1921. We can assume that he had a reasonably good life here, albeit a relatively quiet one. A brief notice in the San Diego Union in the April 20, 1912 edition mentions him as a principal in the sale of a “good lemon grove.”
Isaac also never forgot his Civil War service. A May 25,1916 San Diego Union article describing upcoming memorial services by local GAR officers included this: “Comrade Isaac Barrett will decorate the 40 veterans graves in the National City cemetery.”
Isaac’s life also built and preserved he and Louisa’s own personal union. In his obituary in September, 1921, the Union , noting that he’d been a decades-long member of the local GAR post, “active in his work up to six months ago, when he was suddenly taken ill,” also noted that “More than 50 members of the post attended the golden wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Barrett last New Year’s Day.”
Sources for this post included historic San Diego newspapers and the website Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/ .
You can catch Isaac’s story along with other lesser-known stories of county people, parks and places in my talk, “Hidden Gems of San Diego County,” this Thursday, August 14 at 10 a.m. at the Oasis Lifelong Learning Center at La Mesa. Here’s a link you can use to register for the class:
The photo above, captioned “View in Poway Valley,” is from the book, Picturesque San Diego. Published in 1887, the book offers images and stories about a far less populated, more rural San Diego County than the one we’re familiar with today. Join me as I present some of these images and stories at the Oasis Lifelong Learning Center in La Mesa on Thursday, May 8. Click on the link below to learn more and sign up.
Above is a photo of a vineyard and the ranch house at the Rancho Santa Margarita taken in 1887. It was a time when farming and ranching were still the backbone of San Diego County’s economy. Come join me for my Oasis talk, “Ranchos in San Diego History,” on Friday, April 11, at 10 a.m. at the Oasis Rancho Bernardo Lifelong Learning Center. Go to the San Diego Oasis website, click on “Classes,” then type in “2351” to register. Hope to see you there!
First, the bad news: the California Historical Society (CHS), announced that it had gone out of business. Now the good news: while the society has closed, it has transferred its collection to the Stanford University Library.
CHS, a private non-profit, was founded in 1871 and based in San Francisco. Its collection includes over 600,000 items, from books and newspaper archives to photographs and videotapes. It contains original material from events like the 1848 Gold Rush and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, as well as archives on business, political and social organizations from the Northern California ACLU and California’s floral industry to the Peoples Temple.
While CHS was designated as an official state historical society in 1979, it suffered over the decades from a lack of state support as well as lagging support from private benefactors. To their credit, the society’s leaders always chose ways to keep their collection open and accessible rather than to shut it down. Thankfully, their efforts to save history have succeeded.
Here’s a link to the press release from the Stanford University Libraries on their acquisition of the collection:
San Diego History Seeker 