History purists worry about State Parks Service plans to replace
artifacts in San Juan’s Castro Breen Adobe with interactive
displays and reproductions
An old-fashioned piano, a spinning wheel and lace-making pillow,
a butter churn, a tiny pair of button-up high-heeled ladies boots,
a memorial wreath made from human hair collected through
generations of a pioneering family
– it’s all a part of the history inside San Juan Bautista’s
Castro Breen Adobe.
For now.
History purists worry about State Parks Service plans to replace artifacts in San Juan’s Castro Breen Adobe with interactive displays and reproductions
An old-fashioned piano, a spinning wheel and lace-making pillow, a butter churn, a tiny pair of button-up high-heeled ladies boots, a memorial wreath made from human hair collected through generations of a pioneering family – it’s all a part of the history inside San Juan Bautista’s Castro Breen Adobe.
For now.
“This will all be taken out,” said long-time docent Maureen Chojnacki as she gestured toward the parlor objects that were a part of daily life for San Benito County’s first family, the Breens, who survived the ill-fated Donner Party and arrived penniless in San Juan Bautista in 1848.
Get ready for the new Castro Breen Adobe “experience,” one that will allow fourth-graders to run amuck through hands-on, interactive exhibits featuring life-sized cutouts of the Breens, reproductions of artifacts, barrier-free displays, interpretive “touch-me” graphic panels, 3-D murals and even Disney-esque animal models that emit sounds and move when visitors approach them.
“It’s hardly appropriate to redo a building that was a home, and such a wonderful place for the family after such an ordeal,” said descendant Betty Breen, who said her children used to run through the adobe on their way home from school.
Work on the $1.6 million plan is slated to begin around June 2003.
The 19th century artifacts that currently occupy the downstairs rooms of the famous adobe home will be put in storage or given back to the families – mostly to the modern-day Breens, who have loaned the pieces of history to the SJB State Historic Park for the past 40 years.
While state park officials are enthused about the project, history purists who have been watching over the Castro Breen home for decades are less than thrilled. They say the renovations will require a permanent overhaul of the building’s wiring and that the new displays will wreck the integrity of the building’s living history value. Many believe that if more mission town residents knew what is about to happen, there would be a loud, collective complaint against changing the historical monument and its contents so drastically.
Janet Brians, a long-standing board member of the San Benito County Historical Society, was surprised when she heard about the educational renovations.
“I like the idea of exposing people to more education, but I don’t think this is the proper site for it,” said Brians. “Buildings have personalities. To modernize an adobe, it just doesn’t make sense.”
“The Castro Breen is an original home, not a reproduction like in other parks,” said Chojnacki. “It’s a shining example of pioneer life in the 1800s. What I’m concerned about is destroying our historical past in order to attain our goals for the future. It’s something like throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
But not everyone agrees with this traditionalist notion. Carla Hendershot, a plaza park gift shop volunteer and member of the SJB Plaza History Society, admits she doesn’t know a lot of details about the new project, but thinks it will be a winner.
“You can look at something getting dusty or you can bring it alive,” she said. “You can look at the pinned dead butterflies on the wall or watch them frolicking in a tree.”
Indians, vaqueros and immigrants
Mission Indians built the 10-room adobe between 1840 and 1841 for Don Jose Tiburcio Castro, Prefect of Monterey and Military Governor of California, in the days before U.S. statehood. After Castro died in 1841, his son, Jose Antonio, took over and became a strong force in the Mexican era of California’s early days after he overthrew an unpopular Mexico-appointed governor and took on the job himself. He lived in Monterey but kept the San Juan adobe for his headquarters.
Then in 1848, the immigrating Irish-Catholic Breens arrived in San Juan Bautista. The 10-member family was impoverished but had survived the crossing of the Sierras with the Donner Party just two years before. A mission priest put them up, and then Jose Antonio Castro allowed them to stay in his adobe headquarters.
In that same year, young John Breen, then only 16, ran off to join thousands of others in pursuit of gold and came back a year later with $12,000 worth of gold dust. The family bought the home from Castro, plus 400 acres of prime ag land in the San Juan Valley.
The Breens were the first Anglos to live in the area, yet learned Spanish and spoke it around the house in order to be more in tune with the community. As San Juan was a stagecoach town, the Breens were known for their hospitality and often put up travelers overnight.
The Breens moved out of the adobe after the death of matriarch Margaret Breen in 1874. A woman named Mrs. Flynn then occupied the home and turned it into a boarding house. In 1933, the Breen heirs sold the home to the state and it became a National Historical Landmark in 1970.
Since the 1960s, the Castro Breen Adobe has been a “house museum,” furnished mostly with late 19th century items that were possessed by the Breen family. The current museum arrangement, replete with wooden picket barriers at the entrance of each room to keep people from walking through the corridors and fondling the delicate 140-year-old artifacts, was developed by Ms. A. Elkington, who relied on Breen descendents for information about the layout of furniture and usage of items in the two-story home. According to Chojnacki, the things inside the home are authentic and “period correct” if they aren’t the original Breen artifacts, and everything is preserved almost exactly the way the Breens of the 1800s had lived among them, except the kitchen, which is not in its original location.
Where history comes alive – and whinnies
To read the Castro Breen Adobe Interpretive Plan, an overview of the project by a the design firm Sibbett Group of San Francisco, is like stepping into an “edutainment” wonder world.
California State Parks hired the Sibbett Group earlier this year to come up with a concept and details for the new Castro Breen Adobe. When it’s finished, visitors will “step back in time to experience two distinct time periods, the Mexican era and the early American period.” Braille visitor guides will be available and graphic panels will be written in both English and Spanish.
The placement of furniture and cut-out figures will create natural barriers between visitors, the few authentic artifacts that will remain and sensitive areas of the adobe. In the entry, which currently features General Castro’s tack room, people will instead get a general orientation of the Castro Breen story through two- and three-dimensional exhibits. At the stall window, a curious horse puppet will poke her head inside the room looking for food. When visitors stroke her nose, she will let out a friendly whinny.
The next room, which currently displays the Breen kitchen, will be converted to a moment in time when the Breens became rich from the Gold Rush. Life-sized cutouts will depict adventurer John Breen and one of his siblings as they prepare to uncrate new household goods for their home. All the items will be touchable, and sealed crates will have peepholes that children can look through and view nesting mice. Period furniture will invite people to sit down and become part of the scene. A “mischievous” Bantam rooster model on top of one of the unopened crates will flap his wings when a visitor triggers a motion detector.
Other concealed motion switches will start audio programs, including one that recreates the sound of someone walking in the room above on the second floor and one that plays violin music when a violin is unpacked from one of the crates.
In the stairway hall, life-sized figures of the Breens and the Castros are placed on the stairs to depict the transition of ownership. Behind the stairs a “mischievous” raccoon can be seen hiding.
In what is now the Breen parlor, life-sized cutouts of men, women and children in period dress will show life in Mexican California as the Californios prepare cascarones for the fiesta of Mardi Gras. In one corner a touchable model of a sleeping cat will purr for visitors who approach him. In another room, Don Jose Castro’s office will feature a life-sized cut-out of the governor, a model dog guarding his desk, and sounds of creaky footsteps that become heard through motion sensors.
Proponents say there is no doubt that kids will love it, far more than they do peering between the picket rails of a fence that prevents potential little china shop bulls from running from one room to another.
60,000 fourth-graders a year
There are several reasons why the California State Parks department – the stewarding agency for San Juan’s historical plaza – has decided to take the bold step of converting a classic example of Monterey Colonial history into a modernized educational micro-theme park.
First, the Castro Breen Adobe is a Mecca for an estimated 40- to 60,000 field-tripping fourth-graders throughout the year that make the pilgrimage to the mission from dozens of outlying school districts in central California. Park officials feel an interactive, semi-kinetic display will give them a better sense of Californian history – one their memories will retain longer.
“It will make it a little more learning friendly for the kids,” said Curtis L. Price, SJB State Historical Park Superintendent. “And anything of value, we’ll figure out ways to protect those artifacts.”
Price also believes that the project might have been formed due to the recent government push to make all state parks accessible to everyone, including disabled and wheelchair-bound visitors.
“Everything is a trade-off now,” he said. “You have to provide an equal learning experience for all students, including those who can’t get upstairs. It’s kind of a balancing act.”
For a while, the plan was going to include an elevator in the adobe, but after stiff opposition from even those in favor of the project as a whole, the idea was scrubbed. Instead, a flat-screen interactive video movie of the upstairs bedrooms and their histories will be available in a downstairs display. Visitors will be able to go wherever they want in the adobe by touching the screen.
Price said that the plan was floated for community input during a town meeting last April, but not much input, or interest, arose.
Those that know about the venture seem to be divided on it. A couple visiting the adobe from Eastbourne, southeast of London, said they prefer the static old-fashioned displays such as the one of Margaret Isabella Breen McMahon’s bedroom as it looked on her wedding day on June 16, 1868.
“No, there are places for things like that,” said Nicola Whittaker, when asked about replacing the current displays with the interactive ones.
“A place like this is something, like Shakespeare’s cottage,” added her husband, David Whittaker. “There they leave the house the way it was with the artifacts in it.”
They, like Chojnacki, would like to see the project placed in a new facility.
“Why not house the proposed exhibits in a simple building, one that is easy on the budget, at another location in the park?” said Chojnacki.
Why not ask the opinion of a real Breen?
“I’m disappointed,” said Betty Breen, now of Hollister. “It just doesn’t seem to be what San Juan is all about. But I don’t know. Things evolve. Time changes. But even the staff doesn’t think this is a very good idea. It seems like this (project) is coming from Sacramento.”
Chojnacki agrees.
“History is fragile,” she said. “Once it is gone, it can never be replaced.”
