In the Beginning: the Early Days of the Seaver Center and Remembering Its First Curator, Dr. Errol Wayne Stevens
Errol Stevens worked at the museum from 1985 to 1994. Since that time he remained a friend and advocate of the History Department. His sad passing on January 17, 2020 prompts us to take a look back.
The Seaver Center for Western History Research opened its doors for the first time on Tuesday, April 29, 1986. Ironically, on this same day, an historic fire struck the Central Library downtown destroying numerous records on local history. For the staff of the History Department it must have been a momentous occasion culminating from years of planning that stemmed back to the late 1970s.
The Natural History Museum’s holdings of research materials documenting the history of the American West, and particularly southern California, had grown substantially since the earliest days when one of the museum's founding organizations, the Historical Society of Southern California, had donated books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and photographs in 1913.
These materials belonged to the people of Los Angeles County and have always been open to the public. However, the museum’s main purpose in collecting them was for exhibition and curatorial research. The collections grew in a random fashion, reflecting the collecting interests of individual curators and the resources of different sections of the museum.
While the museum’s Research Library maintained the book collection, the History Department had collected and maintained other historical material, such as photographs, manuscripts, maps, posters and ephemera. By the late 1970s serious thought was given to the idea of pulling these various collections together, placing them under one administrative umbrella and making them available to a wide audience. The renovation of the California History Hall in 1980 provided the intellectual catalyst for this consolidation.
Beginning September, 1982, the Western History Library operated on the Ground Floor of the museum. That same year the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a challenge grant to the Western History Library. In June of 1983, the Seaver Institute, a southern California philanthropic foundation, announced a gift of $300,000 to establish the Seaver Center for Western History Research. Richard C. Seaver, the head of the Institute, was a member of the museum’s Board of Governors - elected in 1967 and remained on the board for nearly 40 years.
Dr. Stevens was hired as Associate Curator of History to lead the Seaver Center, and he hit the ground running at the start of 1985 to set up the new Center by ordering compact shelving. Working closely with the head of the Research Library, Katharine E. S. Donahue, he oversaw the Seaver Center's physical design and layout and developed the necessary infrastructure and policies.
The new Seaver Center reading room, along with an adjacent office, was established in former exhibit spaces. Nearby collection storage arranged onto compact shelves took over another former exhibit gallery.
Soon Errol’s work included historical edits to a 40-page Gold Rush voyage diary, which he published in 1987 as
Incidents of a Voyage to California 1849: a Diary of Travel Aboard the Bark Hersilia, and in Sacramento, 1850. This diary is a part of the founding collection by the Historical Society and is housed in the Seaver Center.
Errol organized several exhibits, and he acquired new collections, including the Jean Stinchfield Ambassador Hotel Publicity collection that documents the former 1921 mid-Wilshire hotel famous for its Cocoanut Grove night club as well as being the site of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
GPF.8036 Maria Maximoff and donor Jean Stinchfield with Errol, 1987
In 1994 Errol left the museum to become head of Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University’s Charles Von der Ahe Library where he stayed until retiring in January, 2006. At LMU he developed the research collections, but his appreciation for the paper and photo collections at the Seaver Center remained with him. As a result, he published journal articles on Helen Hunt Jackson’s impact on southern California tourism through her novel
Ramona, and he explored the Western photography of Frederic Hamer Maude. In both articles he richly cited Seaver Center materials.
His interest in social reform and American radicalism led him to produce the 2009 book,
Radical L.A.: From Coxey’s Army to the Watts Riots, 1894-1965. And just before his passing he completed the manuscript on Los Angeles in the 1930s. One of the main perks of being an archivist is to find one’s affirmation in the pages of the author acknowledgements. Errol wrote of us: “My old and new friends John Cahoon, Betty Uyeda, Brent Riggs, and Beth Werling at the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, made me feel at home whenever I walked through their door.”
