The Presidio Research Center, just down the street from the main El Presidio de Santa Bárbara, was newly renovated and opened in 2007. 
The two-story Presidio Research Center underwent extensive renovation to convert it from its original use as an artists studio. 
The interior of the renovated Presidio Research Center. 
El Presidio de Santa Bárbara: Birth of a City, published in 2013, is typical of many of the publications produced by the Presidio Research Center. 
Documenting Everyday Life in Early Spanish California, published in 1998, is one of the major publications of the Presidio Research Center. 
An archaeology dig underway at the southeast corner of the presidio in the 1970s, with presidio preservation champion Richard Whitehead facing the camera. 
Participants in one of Dr. Robert Hoover’s many summer field schools carefully excavate presidio property. 
The San Francisco Presidio Archaeology Center could be a model for a future archaeology center at the Santa Barbara Presidio. 
Artifacts are catalogued in the San Francisco Presidio Archaeology Center. 
Stacks of historical records, documents and artifacts at the San Francisco Presidio Archaeology Center. 
The Santa Barbara Contractors Association converted artists studios into green buildings, the first such “greened” historic structures in the California State Parks system. 
The Santa Barbara Contractors Association presented Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation executive director Jarrell Jackman with an award for his commitment to the organization’s Built Green Resource Center at El Presidio de Santa Bárbara.
[Noozhawk’s note: One in a series. Click here for previous columns.]
In several previous columns on El Presidio de Santa Bárbara and other Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation projects, I’ve emphasized the importance of research and archaeology.
I’ve also tried to explain the unique situation of the SBTHP drawing from both public and private sources. Through an operating agreement with the California State Parks Department, for instance, SBTHP was allowed to keep rental income from El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park to operate and develop the park.
This public-private partnership also enabled SBTHP to receive funds from a special joint powers agreement with the City of Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara County set up by civic leader and conservation and preservation pioneer Pearl Chase. Although the county dropped out after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the city continued to earmark money for the presidio in its annual budget, not to mention grants that were to come from the city’s since disbanded Redevelopment Agency.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, SBTHP also could receive grants and donations from foundations and individuals.
Starting small, SBTHP used some of its state rental income to create the Presidio Research Center in a two-car garage of the Cañedo Adobe, with a small attached two-room quarters for a live-in maintenance person.
SBTHP board member and presidio preservation champion Richard Whitehead then donated, and we moved, his entire collection of books and documents related to presidio history into this space in the early 1980s. For the next decade and then some, SBTHP used this center to help provide information that documented construction of the presidio and to undertake research for interpreting the last Spanish fort founded in North America.
Among the center’s important publications were Whitehead’s Citadel on the Channel: The Royal Presidio of Santa Barbara, Its Founding and Construction, 1782-1798, published in 1996, and 18th-century documents of supplies ordered and delivered to the presidio.
Translated by UC Santa Barbara graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and edited by board member and the late UCSB professor Giorgio Perissinotto, these documents were published in 1998 under the title Documenting Everyday Life in Early Spanish California: The Santa Barbara Presidio Memorias and Facturas, 1779-1810.
Visitor materials also were researched and published over time, culminating in an excellent brochure entitled El Presidio de Santa Bárbara: Birth of a City published in 2013 in cooperation with Pentacle Press. Taking advantage of material available in the center, Karen Shultz Anderson produced a video in the 1980s that introduced visitors to the park and the history of the presidio.
By the end of the 1990s, SBTHP realized the research center was no longer able to house its growing collection. A former artist studio at nearby 215 E. Canon Perdido was identified and converted to a new and expanded center.
The two-story building with a basement dated from the 1920s and was renovated over the course of several years, thanks to the excellent work of Santa Barbara-based Channel Coast Corp., which provided the most competitive construction bid.
Most of the funding for the renovation came from a large grant from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, state park mitigation dollars thanks to then-state parks Channel Coast District superintendent Steve Treanor, and SBTHP selling one of its properties to the state and then donating all the sale proceeds to finishing the building.
Completed in 2007 and restored to perfection by CCC, it is the finest and largest of any research center in the state park system, although it has been closed for more than a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Once reopened, however, I have created a research organization called the “Presidio Alliance” and hope to see many publications generated out of the center that help us better understand and appreciate the Spanish and Mexican influence on the cultural and social life of Santa Barbara, the state, the nation and world history.
If the noble documentary research efforts at the presidio have resulted in a first-rate facility, the same cannot be said for archaeology and all that has transpired since the 1940s, when an archaeologist first uncovered presidio foundation stones in the backyard of the Cañedo Adobe at the behest of property owner Elmer Whittaker, who was known as an ardent preservationist.
From that date forward, the presidio has yielded its physical remains in dozens of excavations; there has been more archaeology done at the Santa Barbara Presidio than on any other Spanish colonial site in North America.
Large swaths of original 18th-century foundations have been exposed, remains of burials in the cemetery discovered and artifacts, including thousands of potsherds found in trash pits, are stored on site.
At the moment, there is limited educational use made of this bountiful array of archaeological findings — especially when compared to the excellent archaeological center the National Park Service has created at the San Francisco Presidio. In the future, the Santa Barbara Presidio deserves its own archaeological center.
This may seem like one of Jackman’s “Don Quixote dreams,” but in fact a facility on-site has already been restored and could serve that purpose. I am referring to three large, state-owned 1920s, interconnected artist studios that the Santa Barbara Contractors Association converted to green buildings for its offices in the first decade of the 21st century.
These were the first historic buildings “greened” in the state park system and it took some cajoling of the park staff and the city Historic Landmarks Commission before solar panels were finally permitted.
There is not enough space to write about of all that was done to the buildings, including adding double-glazed windows, restoring and replacing floors, installing water-saving features, and insulating all the walls and ceiling.
The contractors association eventually moved to a larger complex, and the greened studios have been rented out commercially. In a way, this is another example of SBTHP’s fundraising successes. In this instance, SBTHP and the state park benefited from a tenant’s improvements in exchange for rent offsets, not to mention providing a model for an environmentally sensitive renovation of the historic buildings.
The approved Presidio General Plan for these rooms, formerly part of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, states that they are to be subject to “adaptive use.” One of the rooms already has been adapted as a classroom, another for office space, and the third could be adapted for storing and studying artifacts uncovered on site.
What a great new place students and even senior volunteers could have to learn about the park version of the “Green New Deal.”
This exciting new world of learning awaits the creative spirit of SBTHP and California State Parks: It might be called “The Santa Barbara Presidio Archaeology and Adobe Resource Center.”
Adobe has been added to the mix, if you will excuse the metaphor; yes, it is a vital part of the story of brown being green that I will talk about in upcoming columns about the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation and its “creative mudslinging.”
— Jarrell Jackman is the former executive director of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. After receiving his Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Barbara, he taught for six years in Europe and Washington, D.C. In 2015, he was honored as a knight of the Royal Order of Isabel la Católica by Spain’s King Felipe VI and was named an honorary state park ranger by the California State Park Rangers Association in 2016. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.