Charlie Macchia

Ms. Stewart

27 September 2021

LIB 121

Convince Us
The Julian Historical Society’s strategic plan has four areas we need to consider: Build
partnerships to help people, inform by sharing our interests, lead through education, and celebrate
diversity.

The Society must create a program to digitize, showcase, and therefore preserve its collection
of history. Our collections must be shown both to the community and to researchers. Digitization
would let us develop our own database, and preserve our knowledge for the people of the future to
learn about because we deserve to be known about and everyone deserves to be shown our amazing
history.

The Julian Historical Society was created in 1963, when Julian’s historians banded together to

preserve Julian’s past for future generations. For over 50 years they have achieved their original goal.

They started by purchasing the Washington mine, which was the first hard rock mine to produce gold in

Julian, and constructing an open air museum where they collected tools and artifacts to share the story

of mining in Julian. These facts could be interesting to aspiring historians because they would delight

in seeing an obscure part of history and also it could be very educational to classes who can teach them.

After succeeding at moving a building and restoring it, the Historical Society settled on

restoring a vehicle. It was a 1912 Mack “Stage”, found in a desert and rusting. The stage was restored

to it’s former glory and put on display for everyone to enjoy. Another matter was that the stage could

not be parked out in the weather, so while it was being restored, it was given a garage. The garage still

stands and is home to the stage and a 1924 Cadillac bus that carried passengers to Julian in the 1900s.

These could be of use to automobile enthusiasts and future engineers because they would be impressed

by the efforts of a historical society who decided to repair it.

 It would be a good idea to utilize the California State Library’s Online Archive of California
and the California Digital Library. Both or either would be good resources to contact for assistance
with digitization. The help of librarians, archivists, or college students would be a big help. For such a
big job as this, we will need all of the help we can get.

So, as you can see, the Julian Historical Society must get on this digitization program as quickly
as possible because future generations must know about our history and it will ensure we are working
toward the community-based goals of our plan, and at the same time, presenting our material to a
worldwide audience. It will pay off immensely in the knowledge that our work will be admired by all
and will survive for generations into the future. The residents of Julian will take pride in the
knowledge that the works of their ancestors will be admired by many, many people. I certainly hope
that this shall come to pass.