San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
WHO WAS NATHAN HARRISON?
He was a former slave who was the first Black homesteader in San Diego. Now he’s the subject of a new exhibit at the San Diego History Center
Who was Nathan Harrison? The most photographed 19th-century San Diegan, by all accounts. But Harrison, the subject of a new exhibition from the San Diego History Center, was much more. Born into slavery in Kentucky, he was brought West for the California Gold Rush, became free and migrated to Southern California sometime in the 1850s. The first Black homesteader in San Diego, Harrison eventually settled on property atop Palomar Mountain, where over the course of decades he became something of a celebrity.
That explains the more than 30 blackand-white photographs that are part of the History Center exhibition “Nathan Harrison: Born Enslaved, Died a San Diego Legend.” The exhibition can be viewed virtually via the center’s website, sandiegohistory.org, before it is scheduled to open for in-person visits beginning April 16.
Besides photographs, the exhibition features a facsimile reconstruction of the cabin Harrison lived in on Palomar Mountain as well as artifacts uncovered at the settlement site by Dr. Seth Mallios, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, and his team of research students. Mallios is also the author of “Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer: Nathan Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend.”
The artifacts in the exhibition, which number in the many thousands, include food cans, jewelry, coins, buttons, implements of everyday living and rifle cartridges. There is also virtual reality technology in the exhibit that affords visitors the opportunity to witness the excavation of the Harrison site as it happened.
The Nathan Harrison story is one learned and now told as a mixture of oral history, sifting through lore and legend, and archaeology. In the years since Harrison’s death in 1920, stories about him have surfaced and spread that vary in their veracity. One thing is certain: Many people made what was a treacherous trip up the mountain to visit Harrison, who by all accounts greeted them with affability and enjoyed his notoriety.
“We want to bring people on the journey to visit Nate,” said Tina Zarpour, education director at the San Diego History Center. “How does a person who’s at the bottom of
“Nathan Harrison: Born Enslaved, Died a San Diego Legend”
When: Available now virtually on demand; in-person visits starting April 16
Where: San Diego History Center, 1649 El Prado, Suite No. 3, Balboa Park
Tickets: Free
Phone: (619) 232-6203
Online: sandiegohistory.org or, to view the virtual tour, bit.ly/nathan-harrison
society make himself safe, make sure he has the sources he needs to live? That’s one of the reasons why it’s an interesting story.
“It’s also about the way we as a society use the past and understand the past. Sometimes we manipulate. That’s what’s been done to Nathan Harrison’s story over time.”
Arguably no one knows more about Harrison than Mallios, who’s been on the Nathan Harrison project for 20 years.
“This project has completely transformed how I feel the relationship between history and archaeology works,” Mallios said. “This took the whole model and threw it away, because so much of the established history when I started has turned out to not only be wrong but to be a very deliberate construction that had sometimes a sinister agenda.”
Indeed, the Nathan Harrison story is one about race as much as about just the man.
“The way that we understand him and see him today is informed by broader discussions of race and ethnicity and the ways that we think about privilege,” said Zarpour, “and the ways that we think about who’s allowed to have a voice and who’s not in different time periods.”
According to Mallios, it’s likely that Harrison settled on Palomar Mountain not merely for isolation but for safety. San Diego County below, at the time, like much of Southern California, was sympathetic to secessionists and Confederate loyalists, and there were so-called “Sundown Towns,” where an African American could not be on the street after dark. Escondido, Mallios said, was one of them.
Oral history over time has revealed that Harrison tended livestock at his cabin, including sheep, and that during his life in the area, he was married twice — to Indigenous women of the nearby Luiseño tribe.
“He went by a different name when he was with the Indigenous population,” Mallios said. “This led to the stunning discovery of a second life that he had. We’ve seen this portrait that he performed for all those hundreds of visitors who came up the mountain. He presented a very funny, charming, nonthreatening Black man who reminded them of this antebellum past.
“A lot of the oral histories of the Indigenous people presented something very different,” Mallios said. “He (Harrison) wasn’t portrayed as this aw-shucks character. He was an expert on the local animals and plants. He knew how to survive a rainstorm, how to build fires. It’s almost as if the White tourists that went up to the site were describing an entirely different person from the one described by the Indigenous people and the ranchers who lived on the mountain.”
The most surprising discovery so far, Mallios said, was a small tin of white makeup found on the site. “That blew me away in terms of the long history of minstrel acts across the nation during this time period. Some of the most quoted lines from Harrison are his playing with ethnic identity. He used to introduce himself to visitors as ‘the first White man on the mountain.’ ”
There is much still to be learned about San Diego’s first Black homesteader. Mallios and his team plan to return to the site on June 1, where more revelations and perhaps more surprises await.