Stroll Through Time on Ellsworth Street
A self-guided tour of what once stood on Ellsworth Street. This project was done as part of the September 2022 Better Block event in Mission San Jose.
Women of Washington Township
Happy Women’s History Month!
Help us celebrate local women from our past while also celebrating Mission San Jose’s 225th Anniversary.
Check back every week in March to learn about another notable woman from Washington Township history who was active in the town of Mission San Jose.
Enjoy!
2022
2021
2020
2019
Tri-City Treasures
This historical, artistic map highlights landmarks, geographic and transportation features, plants and animals that were once a part of the Tri-City landscape – Fremont, Newark and Union City, but have since vanished, passed into oblivion, or been buried by the forward march of time. Each icon on the map has a backstory that you can explore through text, audio and video.
This project is a collaboration between the Washington Township Museum of Local History and California Revealed, an initiative of the California State Library. All artwork has been done by local artist Jeff Schinkel.
Learn more about Tri-City Treasures.
Fremont History Boxes with the boxART! Program
The City of Fremont boxART! program transforms Fremont’s traffic signal control boxes with compelling and creative imagery. The boxes in Fremont’s new downtown area chronicle the history in four eras through representative photos and maps, selected from the Museum’s archives.
- Paseo Padre Pkwy. @ Walnut Ave. – Pre-1920
- Paseo Padre Pkwy. @ Princeton Plaza (Gateway Plaza) – 1920-1956
- Paseo Padre Pkwy. @ Capitol Ave. – 1980 – 2000
- Capitol Ave. @ Fremont Blvd – 1980 – 2000
Learn more about the Fremont History Boxes.
Learn more about Art in Public Places throughout Fremont
Fremont Sounds Like…
Check out FREMONT SOUNDS LIKE… An oral history and field-recording podcast from the largest suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Produced, independently, by Andrew Cavette with support from the museum.
Chinese History Project
For hundreds of years, our area has attracted immigrants from all over the world. Records of Chinese immigrants show up in our local archives at least as early as the 1860s. Stories of the early Chinese immigrants are held in many museums, in archives, and in the personal collections of local families.
Learn more at the Chinese History website
Our Heritage – Interviews and Presentations (1995-Present)
The Tri-City area has a rich history that is a microcosm of our state and national history. This history has been chronicled by members our community but there are many stories that have not yet been told and many who can tell this story are getting older. In this ongoing project we conduct and collect oral history interviews and presentations.
If you are interested in conducting local history interviews please contact us at the museum at info@museumoflocalhistory.org.
Grant Projects
We continue to work hand in hand with the California State Library (via the California Revealed Project) on getting many of our one of a kind local history items scanned and uploaded to the internet. All of this important digitization is done for us free of charge.
In the first round (2016-17), we sent 76 audio and videotapes from our archives. In the second round (2017-18), we sent 328 very old ledgers and journals, early high school and elementary school yearbooks, and local newspapers. In the third round (2018-19), we sent 350 photographs from the Robert Fisher Collection. In the fourth round (2019-20), we sent a selection of 200 photographs from the Julianne Howe Collection — a series of photographs of historic buildings in Fremont that were taken in the 1960s and 70s as a part of the City’s survey of historical buildings. This current round, 2020-21, the bulk of our submissions will be from two large collections of photographic negatives. The images come from the Fremont Unified School District and the Thomas Alwyn (Al) Silva Collection. This last batch will not be live until sometime in 2021, so stay tuned!
Each round takes a year or more from beginning to end, and much preparation work goes into it on our end. The most exciting part of the process is when we are notified of items becoming available online.
We invite you to take the time to visit our collection here: https://archive.org/details/washingtontownshipmuseum and here: https://californiarevealed.org/collections/washington-township-museum-local-history.
You’ll quickly find yourself down a rabbit hole of local history. Have fun!
Thanks to the generous people at Niles Rotary, we also now have an online collections database to help us continue in our mission to share the history of our area with present and future generations.
