I was surprised to learn that there are over 35,000 museums in the US. Surprised until I thought not about the Guggenheims or the Smithsonians, but of all the little oddball museums scattered along highways and in rural towns. I recalled a recent visit to the Old Schoolhouse Museum in Twentynine Palms. The Museum is also home to the Twentynine Palms Historical Society. I visited on their open research day, Wednesdays from 9am to 12pm.

They loved that I was there, loved seeing younger people care about history. It’s kind of like a social hour for the retirees in the community. It didn’t seem like anyone was getting anything done. I picked up bits of odd conversations about coin shows, flea market deals, Miss Twentynine Palms pageants, outhouse races, cooking turkey (it was around Thanksgiving) and what seemed to be a very serious dilemma my table neighbor was having as to whether or not she should bake her house neighbor a cake for his birthday… he had after all made a point to tell her that it was coming up soon. Impossible as it was to focus on anything I was reading, I enjoyed the tid bits.

The schoolhouse embodies the resilience and perseverance of early desert settlers. In the summer of 1927, a group of homesteaders drove from Twentynine Palms to the county seat in San Bernadino to ask the county for a school. The request was scoffed at. The superintendent of schools said she had seen it happen all to often in desert communities: homesteaders don’t last more than 2 years. There weren’t very many families in Twentynine Palms at the time, and only a few had children. But, the community agreed, if they weren’t going to get county money, they would build one themselves. And they did. Bill and Elizabeth Campbell gave 5 acres on the corner of their lot for a school, and others pitched in labor and materials. There was no monetary, people gave what and how they could.

The Campbell Ranch is what is now the Roughley Manor Bed and Breakfast. The Campbells were prominent early homesteaders, who amassed a vast collection of Native American artifacts and carefully archived them. Much of their collection is in the Joshua Tree National Park archives (I wonder how the native community here feels about that). I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point after 1944, the schoolhouse - by then a derelict building - was scheduled for demolition. The Twentynine Palms Historical Society intervened, and bought the building for a dollar from the county, then paid $20,000 to move it where it is today, across the street from the Twentynine Palms Inn. The members of the historical society knew what a feat the school had been to build, and couldn’t see it torn down.

I went over with the intention to sift through any information I could on Anna Poste. Anna Poste and her husband (who would eventually become a judge in the area) came out in the 1920s to homestead. She was a creative person, loved to paint. When she got way out to the desert and didn’t have access to paints and brushes, she made them. She used natural local materials for her paints, and used her dog’s hair to make her brushes. I was really curious what she was using to make her paints. I inferred that she was probably using the sludge from polishing stones. The woman who enthusiastically told me all this couldn’t remember how she came upon the information, and no one else in the room knew where it came from either, it was word of mouth as far as I could tell. So it goes with local history. Looking at the range of her palette and wondering how she got all those vibrant colors, and wondering how we’re all imagining her story, how different the proclivities might be, the varying experiential connections to how we each identify with that tale…

What I love about historical societies and small museums is that they are places where informal, stream of consciousness learning can occur. In the last few years I have had a little experience teaching undergraduate students. Although for the most part hard workers, in general they seem to only work towards a right answer. There is a hesitance to spend time doing something that may not lead to “results” or, an A. I see this as a consequence of standardized testing, of middle and high school teachers having to teach towards these kinds of tests rather towards the development of curiosity, innovative problem solving, and enjoyment in the process of trial and error. I wonder how, for the next class I teach, I can develop a project that will require this kind of exploration, and investigation of the local through oddball museums and historical societies, outside of the classroom…

6760 National Park Dr, Twentynine Palms, CA 92277