Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Papers of John P. Harrington Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Johnson, Miller & Agren Source(s): Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History # of Pages: 12 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-08-30 13:56:17 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 05:50:04 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 05:50:04

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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368 ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS 33 NO. 4 from the old Harrington home and learned that a trunk of Harrington’s papers existed during a casual conversation with Harrington’s grandniece (Benson and Edberg 1982). The cache included extensive Ventureno Chumash linguistic and ethnographic notes from Simplicio Pico, some correspondence, poetry, and Harrington’s high school yearbook. Benson contacted Arthur Harrington, who showed her the unpublished nineteenth-century archaeological journals of the Reverend Stephen Bowers that he had once transcribed for his uncle (Benson 1982). The Venturetio Chumash notes in the collection were forwarded to the National Anthropological Archives in time to be incorporated into volume 3 of the microfilm edition of Harrington’s papers (Mills and Brickfield 1986a). The Bowers journals with Arthur Harrington’s transcriptions were deposited at the Museum along with certain other articles of Harrington memorabilia. The next cache of Harrington’s papers to arrive at the Museum came by a circuitous route. In 1968 Dr. S. Montgomery Whitson, professor of sociology at the old Pepperdine campus in Los Angeles, was approached by someone who had purchased the Santa Ana house where Harrington had resided for many years while undertaking his California fieldwork. The new owner had found several boxes of Harrington’s papers in the Santa Ana house and turned them over to Whitson. Dr. Whitson eventually sent a portion of the material to the Smithsonian Institution and then, after Awona Harrington contacted him in 1978, sent two or three boxes of the remaining items to Frank F. Latta (Whitson, p.c. 1992). At that time Awona had just sent a number of the boxes of Harrington’s papers in her possession to Latta, who had a small private museum at his residence near Santa Cruz. In his correspondence with Awona, Latta stated that he intended his museum to become a West Coast archival repository for Harrington’s papers, along with his own extensive collection of artifacts and manuscripts pertaining to San Joaquin Valley cultural history (Latta n.d.). In the following year, Travis Hudson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, learned of the Harrington notes and memorabilia in Latta’s possession. Hudson visited Latta and asked if Harrington’s specially designed typewriter with linguistic symbols could be transferred to the Museum for a special exhibit devoted to Harrington’s research among the Chumash. Awona Harrington also wrote Latta in support of this proposal (Latta n.d.). Then in 1982, after Latta’s deteriorating health required him to give up his plans for a museum and archives, the Harrington collection was transferred to the Museum of Natural History with the permission of Awona Harrington. With Awona’s accidental death a year later, the collection (as well as other items she had retained in her home) was willed to the Museum. When the materials arrived at the Museum, Travis Hudson roughly sorted the Harrington collection and placed most of the books, papers, and photographs in thirty boxes in the Museum’s archives. For several years thereafter,