The Doors Open Event California is the largest statewide celebration of historic museums and sites in California. Attendees, who can register with a one-time fee of $20 for the whole event, get access to historic architecture, cultural heritage, and exclusively curated exhibits across 75 different sites during weekends in September. These include the Underground Gold Miners Museum, historic theaters in the Sierra Foothills that are rarely open to the public today, Lost Chinatowns of San Jose, Fremont’s Shinn House, and the China Camp Bunkhouse. In Fremont, tour guides share ongoing community research on preserving fragile buildings, unfamiliar histories, and a passion that the California Doors Open Event encourages for both visitors and volunteers.On the weekend from September 12 to 13, the event focused on Fremont’s historic sites. Fremont’s California Nursery, Silent Film Museum, and Niles opened on September 12. On September 13, an event titled “One District, Many Histories: Mission San Jose” allowed visitors to explore the Gardens at Palmdale and Old Mission San Jose Museum.
The event also included the Washington Township Museum, which was formerly Fire Station #4 of the Mission San Jose Fire District. The museum showcases life in the Tri-City area when it was a farming and ranching community, and then transitioned to a suburban community. It also functions as a library for historical books and documents, providing a place for students and enthusiasts to visit and conduct research. Beyond the items displayed, the museum stores artifacts in the cold room, a former fire station shower, and local records, ranging from yearbooks to voting information and property records.
Barbara Baxter, who has volunteered for the past eight years at the Washington Township Museum and worked as a librarian at the Fremont Library, shared her excitement. “I like sharing the information with people, getting to meet them and hear their stories. I grew up here and was involved with the local history collection at the Fremont Library. I was just always interested,” she said.
She continually sparked interest among visitors about the overlooked corners of Fremont’s history. For example, Baxter shared that from 1944 to 1966, Ice Age fossils, including horses, mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and dire wolves, and even fossils of a new species, Tetrameryx irvingtonensis, a four-pronged antelope, were discovered in the Irvington gravel pits on Osgood Road.
This was documented and photographed in Life Magazine, featuring “Boy Paleontologists,” a group of students brought in by San Leandro School District teacher Wes Gorden, to help dig out more fossils. This site was declared the most important early Pleistocene deposit in North America. She added that Palmdale Winery also stood in the same area, which was established around 1884 and fell down in the 1960s earthquake…