Thanks to Noozhawk, I was able to report last month that our town was celebrating its 246th year of its founding at El Presidio de Santa Bárbara.
Mike Hardwick and I shared the stage in explaining this history, and Mike interestingly tied his wonderful volunteer history to the Presidio.
One of the burning questions we raised was how it was that the Presidio was preserved and rebuilt, while the Spanish presidios in San Diego, Monterey and San Francisco were not.
We determined it was our volunteers who made all the difference.
We also thought it would be interesting to single out a number of them because it has been quite an achievement to come into the center of Santa Barbara, convince the state to create a historic park, and then proceed to acquire the land needed to rebuild sections of the fort.
More archaeology has been undertaken at this Spanish Colonial site than anywhere in North America, including in Mexico.
We decided Jeremy Hass was an important figure for Santa Barbarans to learn about, because he was involved early on in taking the Presidio project to Sacramento and convincing the California Department of Parks and Recreation to create a state park.
In 1981, I came on board the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation (SBTHP) and, as executive director, picked up the work Jeremy had begun of acquiring properties in the presidio area.
Having established positive relations with the state, especially with then-state Sen. Bob Lagomarsino, R-Ventura, Jeremy made my job go smoothly.
Among his many other great achievements was working with Irene Suski Fendon, the owner of El Paseo and Casa De la Guerra, to gift the shopping complex and adobe to the SBTHP in 1971.
Eventually, SBTHP sold the complex with a historic easement protecting it, kept ownership of Casa De la Guerra and restored it.
Important sections of land in the presidio area were acquired in the exchange and it allowed the SBTHP to create a quasi-endowment that has since grown to more than $10 million.
Having worked on that real estate transaction, I came to appreciate just how skilled Jeremy was to help pull off the original gift.
Years later, I called Fendon’s second husband, Ron, to inquire what he knew about the El Paseo gift. He remembered dozens of meetings with Jeremy and his wife, and their going into her office to talk.
That talk would result in the gift and, with it, the aforementioned endowment, possession of key presidio properties and relief from managing a shopping center.
The El Paseo deal was talked about as the most complex real estate transaction in Santa Barbara history. From my perspective it certainly was.
What follows is Mike Hardwick’s observations about his close friend, Jeremy.
Readers will note the three of us in the photo as historic re-enactors: yours truly, Jarrell Jackman, as Comandante Felipe Goicoechea, in charge of building the Presidio in the 1790s; Jeremy as Father Junípero Serra; and Mike as Spanish Governor Felipe de Neve.
I definitely caught the living history bug and lots of other good things as CEO of the SBTHP. The public really loved our soldier re-enactors, too. More about them in a future article.
Jeremy Hass, 1936-2014
In the mid-1960s, while working for Jules Brasseur at Santa Barbara Title Co., Jeremy Hass became interested in the Presidio project, a historic site in downtown Santa Barbara.
Joining the Presidio Volunteers, he estimated boundaries of the old fortress and plotted them within current property documents. In 1966, he obtained permission from Elmer Whitaker, owner of the Presidio chapel site, to begin digging for a Presidio wall on a vacant lot.
By 1967, he was an active volunteer of the Presidio project, which conducted archaeological excavations and public events at the site.
I first met Jeremy in late 1969. As fellow Presidio project volunteers, we became fast friends and remained so until his death in 2014.
In early 1971, Jeremy wrote a proposal for the future Presidio project at the request of Pearl Chase and the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.
He artfully negotiated the acquisition and financing of properties in the Presidio neighborhood. In 1972, he forged an innovative concession agreement with California State Parks for the trust, the only nonprofit organization in the state to have such an agreement.
He also served as executive director of the SBTHP during a transition period in 1984 and 1985.
For the next several decades, Jeremy played a major part in property acquisitions for El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park as a lifetime honorary trustee of the SBTHP.
As Jackman described it, he was instrumental in the gift of El Paseo and Casa De la Guerra to the SBTHP. In the 1990s, while a member of the trust’s mills committee, he helped arrange the purchase of the Sana Inés Mission Mills.
In 2000, he received the Pearl Chase Historic Preservation and Conservation Award.
Always a student of history and cultures, Jeremy presented papers at a number of conferences.
His intensive research on the subjects of waterworks, fulling mills and of California pioneer Joseph Chapman contributed not only to his own publications but to the academic field, providing source material for scholarly research on the subject by others.
He was not averse to living history portrayals as pictured nearby.
Jeremy Hass was a key civic advocate behind preserving and rebuilding the Santa Barbara Presidio into the historic landmark that it is today.
A ceramic plaque commemorates his memory and is located in the Presidio chapel.
Fittingly, the plaque is installed next to one honoring the local Filipino community in recognition of its historical connections with the Presidio and its contributions to the design of the chapel altar.
Jeremy himself had strong ties to the Filipino community and was married to a Filipina woman.
