Author: cgu-kierap

This is my
last day as a CLIR CCEPS Fellow. Next week I put my graduate education to work
at a new job I am very excited about! I’ve worked on the Digitizing Southern
California Water Resources project for nearly a year and I feel like I’ve learned
and accomplished so much. In fact, I looked back at what I have done to further
the project and here are only a few quantifiable statistics about what I have
done over the last 10 months:

 

I have
scanned 1,809 pages

I have done
metadata for 2,795 items

I have
uploaded 1,319 items onto The Claremont Colleges Digital Library

I have posted
28 social media posts (across three different social media platforms it would
actually amount to 84 discrete posts)

I have written
40 blog posts

 

When I look
at what I have been able to accomplish just in sheer numbers, I am taken aback.
I know I have worked hard during my time as a CLIR CCEPS Fellow, but to be able
to quantify these tasks is amazing.

 

One statistic
I didn’t have time to track down was how many podcasts I have listened to while
working here. I know it exists and I know it would startle you as much as it
would startle me. Let’s just say, it must be in the hundreds by now, and no, I
am not being hyperbolic.

 

There are,
of course, unquantifiable experiences that I have had during my time here.
There is no statistic that properly conveys how much I have enjoyed working
with Tanya, the other CLIR CCEPS Fellows, and the rest of the library staff. I
consider them friends as much as colleagues and it is bittersweet to leave this
position because it means I won’t be able to work with these wonderful, intelligent
people anymore.

 

The CLIR
CCEPS Fellowship has been a huge feature of my graduate education. It has
complemented my interests in Cultural and Museum Studies and it has provided me with skills that will undoubtedly assist me in my new job and future career. For this,
I am endlessly grateful to The Claremont Colleges Library, the Special Collections,
and The Council on Library and Information Resources for making my
participation in this project possible.

I will leave you with a
quote, written in 1887 by a resident of Ontario, California, that best
expresses my feelings about my time working here. “I have been bettered in coming here. I should hope you would
also.”

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In a letter from December, 1887 Charles Frankish sends his condolences to a man who suffered a “bilious attack.” As someone who is interested in medical history, my interest was piqued. I looked up the term “bilious attack,” and the internet returned the following Merriam Webster definition:

A. biology : of or relating to a yellow or greenish fluid that is secreted by the liver and that aids especially in the emulsification and absorption of fats – of or relating to bile

B. biology : marked by or suffering from liver dysfunction and especially excessive secretion of bile – a bilious attack – a bilious patient

C. appearing as if affected by a bilious disorder – a sickly bilious face

Apparently this man had some sort of liver disease, which was known as a bilious attack at the time. Reading further I came across this passage on the Merriam Webster website: 

Bilious is one of several words whose origins trace to the old belief that four bodily humors (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) control temperament. Just like phlegmatic (“of a slow and stolid phlegm-driven character”), melancholy (“experiencing dejection associated with black bile”), and sanguine (“of a cheerful, blood-based disposition”), bilious suggests a personality associated with an excess of one of the humors – in this case, yellow bile. Bilious, which first appeared in English in the mid-1500s, derives from the Middle French bilieux, which in turn traces to bilis, Latin for bile. In the past, “bile” was also called choler, which gives us choleric, a synonym of bilious.

It is interesting how ideas influence language, even after the ideas have gone out of vogue. For example, liver spots are not related to the liver at all and are instead caused by sun exposure, almost like a large freckle. However, liver spots were named because people once believed they were a symptom of liver problems. So even though we know they are not caused by liver disease, language has not adjusted to our new knowledge.

It is also interesting how words originally used for medical conditions, become associated with personality traits. I’m sure there is a historical reason for this, but I don’t know what it is. All I know is that I’ve used the word melancholy many times and never meant for it to be related to black bile.

This week I
continued to work on metadata and upload letters from Charles Frankish. Now
that I have worked on so many letters, I am starting to recognize names and
patterns in the documents. It is almost as if I am reading a long, abstract
novel where characters and events are related to the reader through Frankish’s
perspective. It took many letters before I could recognize stories developing
and a lot of work for me to piece the narrative back together since the letters
are all outgoing mail. However, it is a rewarding and exciting feeling to open
up a file and find a clue to what is happening in Ontario, California in the
1880s. Now, when I see a familiar name I get an idea of how Charles Frankish
will address them, what the letter will discuss, etc. And different events
develop over the course of many letters, such as the construction of the
electric railway that I mentioned last week. Each letter on a certain topic
updates me on the progress and setbacks that Frankish encountered so many years
ago.

This week I
have done so much metadata for the Charles Frankish letters. It is incredible
the amount of letters that I have been able to get through this week. I have
uploaded nearly 200 new letters on the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. I
wish I had more to say about the letters, but most of them detail various
business transactions for the Ontario Land Company. In particular these letters
provide information about property values, the sale of land, and water stocks.
Some of the more interesting topics include the construction of an electric
railway in Ontario as well as the development of a commercial center in the new
city. These letters haven’t been particularly interesting to me, but the facts
and figures included in these letters could provide researchers with useful data.
Check them out on the Claremont Colleges Digital Library!

After
months of creating metadata for the Chaffey brothers, I am finally done
uploading the Chaffey letters to the digital library! This is an exciting moment
because now researchers can access all of the letters in our collection online.
I have written blog posts before about the various historical narratives that
can be gleaned from these narratives, and I hope others find that to be true
the next time they visit the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. It seems odd
that I have read almost every Chaffey letter in our collection and now I am
done. There are no more Chaffey letters left for me to read.

Now I turn
to Charles Frankish and the large collection of letters from him that we have
in our collection. After the Chaffey brothers established Ontario, California
they moved to Australia to start a new colony based on the success of the
Ontario colony. They left Ontario in the hands of Charles Frankish who
continued to develop the city. Creating metadata for Charles Frankish is much
easier given the context I have from the Chaffey brothers’ letters. Charles
Frankish had to respond to many of the same issues that the Chaffey brothers
dealt with. However, new plans were also being made as the city grew rapidly.

For
example, several letters from 1887 refer to an electric railway being
constructed along an eight-mile strip of Euclid Avenue. It’s fascinating to
read the letters in chronological order because I feel like I am watching a
city being built. It’s even more interesting because I have been to Ontario,
and can think back to what changes the city has gone through to get from the
small settlement founded by the Chaffeys and developed by Charles Frankish to
the modern city we can visit today.

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This week has been kind of an odd one for me. I had planned to finish up the metadata for the Chaffey letters, but I encountered some issues with our metadata software, CONTENTdm. I was in the middle of uploading a series of documents about the Colorado River Aqueduct and the Hoover Dam to the Claremont Colleges Digital Library when the metadata software started operating very slowly. After doing some trouble shooting with Tanya and the software providers, we eventually got the metadata software up and running again.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some miscellaneous tasks related to the Chaffey brothers and Frankish letters. I used an excel spreadsheet to track metadata for the documents for which I couldn’t use CONTENTdm. I also cleaned up some of our internal files, in particular a file which tracks the progress for each and every item that we work on. These internal files help CLIR CCEPS fellows keep track of the items in the collection that we all work on and sometimes it is nice to make sure that these files are up to date. This is especially the case because pretty soon we will have some new faces here at CLIR CCEPS. I was happy to see that for the most part these files were in pretty good condition, but it is always nice to double-check that things are complete and consistent.

The big lesson I learned this week was how important our technology, especially our software, is to this project. We use very specialized equipment and software every step of the way to get the original physical documents onto the Claremont Colleges Digital Library, so it’s important that everything is working. I’m glad our metadata software is back up and running!

If you have been keeping track of our social media accounts, you may have noticed that we have recently started posting photographs from around 1911-1915. Last week Tanya and I went through an album of incredibly interesting photographs of the San Antonio Canyon and the Pomona Valley. The San Antonio Canyon is responsible for carrying water down to the Pomona Valley from the San Gabriel Mountains. Claremont and this surrounding area is part of the Pomona Valley. However, sometimes the Pomona Valley floods when lots of water runs down the mountains and through the San Antonio Canyon. Flooding can cause damage to homes, infrastructure such as roads, and agricultural lands. This was a huge problem in the early 20^th century for local residents who primarily relied on agriculture for their livelihood.

Flood control was an important issue for people during this time and a variety of things were done to protect this fertile alluvial plain. These measures were documented and now they are part of the Willis S. Jones Papers at The Claremont Colleges Library. There are photos of streams, ditches, rock dams, cement dams, and even of the damages sustained in certain floods. This album specifically highlights the Osgoodby Dam in the San Antonio Canyon and a series of floods in 1914 that caused major damages in the Pomona Valley. I have taken photographs of particularly interesting parts of this album and over the next several weeks I will be sharing them on our social media accounts, which are listed below. Join in the conversation with #CLIRWater!

Twitter: @honnoldlibrary

Instagram: @honnoldlibrary

Facebook: CLIRWater

In the first part of 1884 William Chaffey sent letters to C. H. Dwinelle about what it would take to set up a farm in Ontario, California. In the first letter I came across, Chaffey describes the different kinds of fruit tree available along with the prices of each type of tree. Chaffey also explains that the trees for Ontario farms come from Los Angeles nurseries which in turn get their trees from the north. The next letter, dated a couple days later was about which lots in Ontario Dwinelle was interested in buying. Apparently Dwinelle was interested in purchasing three plots of land, but the ones he was most interested had already been purchased. In the latest letter I found,  William Chaffey describes the kind of work his workers can do to set up and care for Dwinelle’s land. Chaffey lists the approximate price for the materials and the labor. I found this series of letters interesting because I was able to see a little bit of the progression for someone interested in purchasing land from the Chaffey brothers during this time period.

Last week I came across a letter that referenced the price of land in Ontario in 1884. I’ve seen references to property prices before but this was the first time I thought about what those prices really mean. In 1884 prime property sold for $200 per acre and the rest sold for $150 per acre. I got online and did some research about what $200 in 1884 would translate to money today. Apparently $200 from 1884 converts to about $5,000 in 2018, an immense difference!

However, I went one step further. After all, the value of land is related to more than just a simple calculation of inflation over time. In 1884 Ontario, California was in its infancy, whereas today Ontario is part of the greater Los Angeles urban area. I’ve already spoken about the population growth in Ontario from its initial 200 residents to 170,000 people. The population increase is just one symptom of people wanting to reside in Southern California. Rent and property prices are another symptom, as more people need housing, property prices increase.

So I returned to the internet for more answers. How much does an acre of undeveloped land cost in Ontario today? Any guesses from the audience? Drum roll… $500,000! For one acre of land. That’s 100 times the price (taking inflation into account) of land in 1884.

This week I ran across a letter addressed to Wells Fargo & Company. It was interesting to see the name of a company that still exists today. I was inspired to do a little bit of research to find out more about the history of the company. The first thing I learned was that the company was named after its two founders, Henry Wells and William Fargo. I had never thought about how Wells Fargo & Company got its name, but I guess it makes sense that it would have been named after people.

I also did a little research about the founders of Wells Fargo & Company after finding this letter. Henry Wells first became successful after he started an express postal company that would carry mail at a lower rate than the United States Post Office. William Fargo started carrying mail at the age of 13! Eventually, the two came together to form Wells Fargo & Company AND the American Express Company in the mid-1800s. Again, I was surprised to hear about the initiation of a company like American Express.

The letter to Wells Fargo & Company is actually not that exciting. George Chaffey is writing to Wells Fargo & Company about sending cash to someone named E. B. Love through Wells Fargo & Company. I could not figure out who E. B. Love was or what his significance might be–that will have to be a task for a historian who is better equipped.