Until I was five years old, I had never heard of Santa Claus. Instead, being born in Holland, each year I anticipated the December 5th arrival of Sinterklaas and his stalwart assistant Zwarte Piet. Supposedly, they arrived from Spain on a steamship complete with the blessed bishop’s white horse, which huppelt het dek op en […]

Last Sunday’s opening of the new Michael Towbes Library Plaza was everything the Journal’s Jeff Wing predicted it would be in a recent edition of the weekly MJ. It was indeed a mezzo shout of happy civic hollering as a Pandora’s box of color and sound reverberated on the sun splashed block party on Anapamu […]

Back in 1924, when Edward A. Johnson celebrated the opening of his spectacular Granada Theatre, he arranged for a program that highlighted the flexibility of the new venue. In addition to one of the first-ever 3-D movies, cartoons, a ballet performance, and the world premiere of Mae Murray’s Mademoiselle Midnight, he hired Antonio P. Sarli […]

In early 1910, the local newspapers were abuzz and the paparazzi were sharpening their pencils in anticipation of the arrival of the great philanthropist and Steel King, Andrew Carnegie, in Santa Barbara. Carnegie had left Pittsburgh on February 15 in the company of his wife Louise, daughter Margaret, his associate Charles Lewis Taylor, and four […]

During the California Gold Rush, eggs cost a whopping $3 dollars each, which translates as $120 per egg today. The high price of eggs, however, did not lead to a thriving poultry business. Chickens couldn’t be herded across the plains and were difficult and expensive to transport in great numbers around the Horn. Besides, wild […]

Old Spanish Days Fiesta is rooted in the dozens of short-lived attempts to establish an annual festival in Santa Barbara, starting, perhaps, with the 1886 Mission Centennial celebration. In 1924, the fiesta that was created to celebrate the opening of the new Lobero Theatre succeeded spectacularly. This year marks its 100th year anniversary. Months of […]

By 1880, Montecito’s Hot Springs were so ancient that the Morning Press felt compelled to write their history. The hot springs, the article said, had been used by the Chumash since time immemorial. After the coming of the Europeans, the springs, though belonging first to the Pueblo and then to the City of Santa Barbara, […]

Though the ancients relied on oral tradition to pass along the history and culture of their societies, today a community’s history exists in written forms. Civic, personal, and business records provide accurate facts about past events and issues. Often, however, news articles are the best starting point for uncovering the past. In fact, newspapers are […]

In December 1922, Edward A. Johnson, president of the California Theater Company that owned most of the movie houses in Santa Barbara, announced plans to build a theater and eight-story office building on State Street. Despite touches of Spanish design, many felt the tall rectangular structure did not suit Santa Barbara’s emerging Mediterranean style. Nevertheless, […]

In July 1909, much to the alarm of the Santa Barbara populace, the Morning Press announced that the venerable Covarrubias Adobe was to be razed and replaced by a modern apartment building. Without notice, Nicolas Covarrubias had sold it out from under his aging siblings, Camillo and Amelia. The first they heard of the sale […]

In January 1904, the Santa Barbara Independent informed the public that a “very notable art exhibit” had opened at 1212 State St. in the building that recently housed the Chamber of Commerce. For 25 cents, visitors could see the much-lauded oil paintings of the 21 missions of California by Edwin Deakin. “Each of the 21 […]

Upon the death of beloved local artist Dudley Saltonstall Carpenter in 1955, the newspaper expressed the esteem in which he was held and commented that he had continued to paint to the end of his full and creative life. And what a life that was. Born into a military family in 1870 in Nashville, Tennessee, […]

A late afternoon sun graced another lovely event at Bellosguardo on Thursday, September 21. That day, the Bellosguardo Foundation hosted a reception and book talk by Liz Brown, author of Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire. As guests mingled and explored the estate, docents were on hand […]

I couldn’t believe they made a movie about Barbie. Seriously? The doll whose body gave three generations of prepubescent girls inferiority complexes and set a standard so high some became devotees of augmentation surgery? Then I read Josef Woodard’s movie review, one which doesn’t end in a resounding nay or yay, but with – “…the […]

From the Carpinteria Bluffs to Arroyo Hondo Preserve on the Gaviota Coast; from Ennisbrook Open Space in Montecito to the Hibbits Ranch in Lompoc, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County has worked to conserve, preserve, and protect over 31,890 acres of land as well as trail easements. With the increased density and rapid suburbanization […]

Celebrating the 99th anniversary of its founding this year, Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days Fiesta was established in August 1924. Civic celebrations commemorating Santa Barbara’s old Spanish days, however, date back to the December 1886 fiesta celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Mission Santa Barbara. The purpose of that four-day celebration was to […]

In 1960, the Brothers Four sang, “Once there were green fields, kissed by the sun. Once there were valleys where rivers used to run….” (Many of you know the tune.)  While the song is about a lost romantic love, in another, more literal sense, it could be considered a mourning for the loss of the […]

In Colonial Jamestown, having survived the starving time and learned how to work thanks to Captain John Smith’s edict of “no work, no food,” the male colonists wanted women. Not just for the delights of the fairer sex, but to share the work. Among her housewifery chores, a woman in Colonial America spun the wool, […]

The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County has given us an amazing Valentine’s Day gift. A thousand red roses could not compete with the nearly 50 verdant acres the Trust has just added to its Arroyo Hondo Preserve. Since the Preserve’s founding in 2001, more than 1,600 visitors have walked its trails and 26,000 students […]

“Clarence Mattei painted a portrait of our nation from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Shoreline… His portraits formed an album of an era which was melding the personalities of the fearless, rugged stagecoach drivers of the Wild West to the quiet confidence and well-bred sophistication of East Coast Philanthropy,” Erin Graffy, local historian, wrote […]

It was Shuku when a band of nearly 300 Chumash lived on the point of land that today marks the boundary between Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. It became Rancheria San Mateo after the Spanish settled the area in 1782. It became El Rincon (the corner) after the Mexican governor of Alta California granted the […]

In 1854, Pope Pius the IX consecrated Thaddeus Amat y Brusi as bishop of Monterey. The reluctant prelate (he had tried to ditch the papal appointment) moved the headquarters of the diocese to Santa Barbara where he planned to build a cathedral for the relics of the newly beatified Saint Viviana. Arriving in December of […]

An impressive fountain sprays high into the sky at the point where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converge to form the Ohio River. The waters from the fountain come from yet a third river that runs underground to add its own effluence to la belle rivière. Here, at this historic confluence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is […]

The town is awash with the news that Betsy Green, local historian and author, has published a book about the “pictures” that were filmed at some of Montecito’s most notable estates. Betsy, a transplant from the Chicago area and former staff editor of World Book Encyclopedia, has written an encyclopedia of moviemaking in Montecito during […]

In the 1920s, American Santa Barbarans, enthralled with the mystique of Santa Barbara’s romantic Spanish past, set about preserving the rapidly-disappearing adobes. Ester Hammond purchased and paid for the preservation of the Hill/Carrillo Adobe, architect Louise McVhay completely renovated the Gonzalez/Ramirez adobe to reflect her vision of a romantic ranch house, and Irene and Bernhard […]

John Muir once wrote, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you… and cares will drop away like the leaves of Autumn.” The Santa Barbara Historical Museum’s latest exhibition celebrates the region’s increasingly popular hiking trails and public lands. Isolated by COVID, locked out of their gyms, and finally […]

The quest for the right way to live, the right way to be, and the search for a satisfying and happy life has spanned millennia; just ask Socrates. Between 1663 and 1820 in the United States, besides being a stimulus for emigration from the “old world,” this quest led to the establishment of over 32 […]

As the Mule smoothly powers up the West Ridge Trail of Arroyo Hondo Preserve, we pass a flock of sheep grazing on yellow-flowered mustard. The wooly beasts and their owners await an upcoming shearing day in the paddock at the base of the hill. In the meantime, the flock munches on the grasses and mustard […]

Lockwood de Forest (Sr.) was already considered one of the best-known landscape painters in the United States when he made his first appearance in Santa Barbara in late 1902. Captivated by the landscape, he painted over 100 oil sketches of the countryside by February 1903. That month, 112 of them were exhibited at Mrs. Tadd’s […]

In 1854, Pope Pius IX consecrated Thaddeus Amat y Brusi as bishop of Monterey. The reluctant prelate (he had tried to ditch the papal appointment) moved the headquarters of the diocese to Santa Barbara where he planned to build a cathedral for the relics of the newly beatified Saint Viviana. Arriving in December 1855, the […]

In 1886, the Santa Barbara waterfront was connected to three, often odiferous, esteros and littered with dilapidated shacks and the detritus of the hide and tallow industry. Despite the fact that there were several crude wooden bathhouses, the area was generally a “wild waste of sand, tin cans, and dead animals,” according to historian C.W. […]

Above the riparian corridor of Arroyo Hondo, a bleak Daliesque landscape reveals the aftermath of October’s Alisal Fire. Chaparral that hadn’t burned in too many years fed the wind-driven fire into the canyon from the east. Despite the grazing program of sheep and cattle on the hills flanking both sides of the lower canyon, the […]

In mid-September, my husband Michael and I hit the road and traveled to Kellogg, Idaho, to ride the rails. Our locomotion, however, was pedal-powered and the iron rails had long been torn out, leaving behind two rail corridors: one of the Union Pacific Railroad and the other of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific […]

A congenial and festive crowd gathered in the lovely courtyard of the Santa Barbara Historical Museum to celebrate the opening of guest curator Marlene Miller’s exhibit, Borein and His Circle of Friends on Thursday, September 22. The balmy warmth of the evening was matched by the warmth of the response to the exhibit and the […]

When ceramic artist Joan Rosenberg-Dent was invited to create a sculptural installation for the gardens of Casa del Herrero as part of a contemporary exhibition entitled “Symbiotic,” she immediately thought, “Well, of course, — abstracted flowers.” What followed was a unique collaboration between Joan and Lynda Weinman, who utilizes 3D clay printing techniques in her […]

Erroneously translated as “little mountain,” the name El Montecito is an archaic use of the Spanish word meaning woodland or countryside. It was being used to designate the eastern part of the Pueblo Lands of Santa Barbara as early as the 1780s. Considered a wilderness, it only became populated when retiring soldiers of the Presidio, […]

In 1919, Santa Barbarans had learned to work together for the war effort, and the time was ripe for a new era to begin, one that would start with the formation of a community chorus and blossom into a cultural renaissance. The community chorus idea had been borne of the idealism of the Progressive Era […]

In the early 1920s, the artist John Dwight Bridge was a popular and important force in the cultural renaissance fostered by the Community Arts Association. Having proven himself in earlier productions of the Community Arts Players, he may have reached his apex when he took on the role of Nicola, the Bulgarian manservant in George […]

The moon was nearly full that blustery March night in 1933, when a lone figure paused on the platform of Salina, Kansas, the closest train depot to the geographic center of the nation. Withdrawing the last of his money from a pocket of his corduroy trousers, he carefully placed the quarter and nickel on the […]

Her friends remembered her as eccentric, fun-loving, and generous and called her Peggy. In the late Elane Griscom’s 1990 Montecito Magazine article about Marguerite Ravenscroft, Kit McMahon, then archivist of the Montecito Association History Committee, remembered that Peggy once gave a $50,000 loan to a friend from cash tucked away in various spots in her […]