Museum aspires to be a Nugget in restoration
Paying tribute to town’s history ‘is a step to rebuild Paradise’
PARADISE » The beloved Gold Nugget Museum lost almost everything in last year’s Camp Fire. Gone are antique guns and mining certificates, military uniforms and a baptismal gown. Native American baskets and a 1909 automobile, hundreds of heirloom dolls and thousands of historic photos. The flames even melted the plaster replica of the famed 54-pound nugget that birthed this town.
This is what it gained: dozens of small white crosses, memorializing the fire’s dead. And a vision to rebuild the heart of a place that almost vanished.
“Everything’s changed,” said museum president Don Criswell, 73, who led the purchase last week of a site for a new museum that also will serve as an educational center and community spot.
“This is a step not just to replace the old museum,” he said. “It is a step to rebuild Paradise.”
On the one-year anniversary of the devastating fire, the museum stands at the crossroads of the region’s past and future.
Only one-fifth of the town’s population remains. Even under the most robust growth scenario, Paradise won’t reach its pre-fire population until 2030 or 2035. Instead of seven schools, there are two. More than 14,500 homes were lost; only 1,856 remain. The town’s radio station is gone.
Yet a new Paradise is emerging. Six new homes have been built, and
city officials receive an average of 70 new building permit applications a month— totaling 500 by the end of the year, far more than the 200 it anticipated.
A flurry of new businesses have opened, from Nic’s Restaurant and Taco Bell to the Pee Wee Preschool.
But at the Gold Nugget Museum, which has reopened temporarily in the nearby Paradise train depot, it’s impossible to replace what’s gone. More than a century of Paradise Ridge history was encapsulated inside, offering the most tangible record of a place conceived as a small gold mining camp.
Its loss was an immeasurable blow to the town’s cultural memory.
“You can’t replace history,” said Randy Coy, a Chico collector who lost about 100 vintage toys on loan to the museum.
On the morning of the fire, Coy was working at the museum, installing a Christmas display of toys donated from his and a friend’s collection.
But as smoke clouds gathered overhead, he grew worried and started quickly boxing up some of his most treasured items. Using white rags left in the back of his truck, he wrapped up each item, ranging from 1920s-era Marx trucks and trains to Disney toy characters from the 1950s.
“I thought I was overreacting. I was methodical andmoving fast, trying to pick the better stuff but missed a lot,” he said.
Rushing to safety, he left behind a toy fire engine, a beloved 1955 Christmas gift to Coy when he was 4 years old. Perched on a top shelf, the engine could only be reached with a 9-foot ladder.
Within an hour, the museum’s wooden structure and its eight outbuildings— including amining cabin— were consumed by flames.
There’s no surviving inventory of the collection; that list, saved in a computer and external hard drive on the property, is gone. From memory, the museum’s staff and volunteers have pieced together a list of artifacts of the museum, founded in 1973 to commemorate the town’s prospecting past.
The staff mourns the loss of a CivilWar- era percussion cap musket rifle, as well as a large leather bag that carried the gun’s cartridge boxes, labeled with “SNY” brass plate, signifying the 7thNewYork volunteer infantry.
Also gone is an 1890 Marysville saddle, daguerreotype and tintype photographs, a 1909 Brush Runabout automobile and a research librarywith bound newspapers.
“Themuseumlost 98% of the collection. The heat and velocity of the fire left very little,” said Georgia Fox, professor of Museum Studies and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Cal State Chico. “Even the metal filing cabinets; there was nothing left inside.”
There’s a human toll, too. One of the museum’s docents, storyteller and historian John Sedwick, died at home during the fire. Only five of the museum’s 15 board members remain; the rest were forced tomove away.
On a cold and damp weekend in February, museum staff and a team of experts from Cal State Chico’s anthropology and archeology departments led an effort to scour the site for anything worth saving. The once-formidable nugget looked like a soggy loaf of bread. They found pottery shards, melted metal typewriters, some mining equipment and bits and body parts of ceramic dolls.
“Just the doll heads,” Fox recalled. “It was so eerie— faces in the ash, looking up, with glassy eyes.”
In the ashes near themuseum, they found metal logging equipment and Native American grinding stones, darts and other stone hunting tools. On the site of a replica goldmine, Cal State Chico anthropologist Carly Whelan said, they recovered a metal shovel handle.
They couldn’t find the historic musket but spotted itsmetal barrel.
“Just a piece of pipe,” Criswell said.
They also discovered a charred button belonging to the coat of Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly, a celebrated soldier, hunter, trapper, scout and friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, who fell in love with Paradise in 1915, living in the town until his death.
Local history museums play an outsized role in the nation’s civic memory, said Alicia Goehring of the CaliforniaHistorical Society in San Francisco.
“They are every bit as important as state and national history museums,” she said. “One reason is accessibility; we can’t all go to Sacramento orWashington, D.C. Secondly, they help people understand the history all around them, every day, everywhere you look. And only when you see history through the eyes of local people do you understand that experience.”
They seem immortal, with a mission to forever preserve and protect their collections.
“We were the conservators. We were the repositories,” said Criswell, whose family settled on Paradise Ridge in the 1920s and ’30s. “History matters here. Our streets are named after people. Not numbers. Not alphabetic letters.”
While major urban museums in San Francisco and Los Angeles can invest in lavish protections, the state’s local museums lack the funding to digitize and safeguard their treasures, Fox said. There are small federal grants, she said, but “the resources are few and the needs are great.”
As the Getty fire bore down on Los Angeles last month, for instance, the $1 billion GettyMuseum complex had no need to evacuate its treasures. Fire-resistant travertine stone lines its exterior walls and its roof is covered by crushed stone. A recycled air systemprotects against smoke. Locked doors seal every gallery. There’s a nearby 1 million-gallon water tank for firefighting.
“Wewerewood and plaster. Doomed,” Criswell said.
The new museum — a fire-resistant metal building with large bay doors — will be a very different place, museumleaders said. On the site of a former automotive repair shop, it is twice as large as the oldmuseum, with 2.3 acres.
To be sure, the museum’s popular school program will be rebuilt. So will the “Living History Center,” with live presentations. Staff members want to start another research library. Already gifts to rebuild the collection have been donated, such as an old photo of the Sterling City and Black Diamond mines and a beautiful red and black brocade dress, once worn by a celebratory Gold Nugget Day Queen.
But the new museum aspires to be more than a repository and educational center. It seeks to provide a place where the community can gather, collaborating with other organizations in events that combine history, art and performance, Criswell said.
And there will be a new exhibit about the Camp fire, the most tragic chapter of Paradise’s past, said museum operations manager Michelle Rader. Designed with local Fire Safe Councils, it will include information about the cause and consequences of wildfires, as well as prevention.
Also featured will be a memorial, likely including some of the white wooden crosses from the collection that stood for months near the town entrance, poignant reminders of 86 lives lost. These plywood crosses, weathered and dilapidated, are now in the museum’s storage.
“Fire is an important part of our history now,” Rader said. “It’s a big part of our history, but it’s not the only thing.”
Do you have any Paradise Ridge artifacts or photos in your home? The new museum seeks loans, gifts and financial contributions. Go to goldnuggetmuseum.com