I am so happy to be here tonight mayor mayor pro tem council members city manager city staff. Thank you so much for having me as Jonathan said my name is Alaina Brokaw, I am the Barbara Bernhardt Smith CEO at the Museum of Ventura County and for those of you who don't know we are the We are an art history and culture museum. We have four physical sites, two in downtown Ventura, an agriculture museum in Santa Paula, and we now have office suites in Camarillo, and we are the largest repository of history and culture in the county. We are guided by the wisdom of an incredible board of directors, one of whom is a resident here in Moorpark, and that is County CEO Savette Johnson We also have over 100 volunteers who are guiding all of our efforts at all time.
And these volunteers come from all over Ventura County, so that's who leads us in our efforts as to what we do. We work to represent our region's unique identity in everything that we collect. Our focus here is on accessibility and as you can see right here, we have this browse items 8165 total. That is our online digitized items. It's actually much higher than that, I got that like a few weeks ago so it's over 8400 now.
Everything we do we try to make it accessible so people can learn about what created this county. Using those collections we provide rotating exhibits in our six galleries at three sites. We present about 30 programs each year Accessibility, again, is very important to us. We have a new program where we get sponsors to make admission entirely free. Our exhibits are opening in June and Southern California Edison is going to be our sponsor for that month. Everybody will come in free. It's almost quadrupled our attendance at the downtown site.
And here is who is coming to the museum. This is attendance just for our exhibits, about two-thirds of our visitors come from Ventura County another 25% come from throughout the state and then about 8% come nationally and internationally In education we provide school tours directly for second in Santa Paula and third graders in Ventura Tours are entirely free for Title I schools and we have grants that provide buses completely free.
We present satellite pop-ups and programs all over the city, and here you can see what we have done in Moorpark itself over the last two years including participating in the Apricot Festival last weekend which we were so happy to be able to do. Maybe some of you got to go into the High Street Theater and see our exhibits there. So those collections, exhibits, programs and education all serve the museum's foundational principles which are these.
We work to engage participants in meaningful experiences with history, art culture and each other. And we aim to build community and connection. Connection, connection, connection. Everything we do is about connection. And one way that we do that, build connection is to highlight our shared history And to that end, tonight I would like to share a little bit of a story about the origins of Moorpark.
Before I get into this, everything that I'm sharing with you is from our archives, our collections and our library. All the photos you will see are from there. So before we get started specifically about Moorpark, just bear with me. I want to give you a really short history lesson of what is it? 13,000 years not 130,000 years. You all know that this place that we are standing on right now has always been home Home to the Chumash indigenous population including a village right here in what is now Moorpark.
About 250 years ago, sorry about 500 years ago in 1542 the California coast including here was discovered by a sailor named Juan Cabrillo, who was sailing for Spain. And this whole area was colonized and claimed as part of New Spain. So suddenly we belong to somebody and we belong to Spain. About 250 years ago, Spain began to move in. They began to populate the region, and that's when our missions came about. They wanted to get people on the ground. About 200 years ago, Mexico revolted against the colonizers from Spain and miraculously they won. It's shocking that they did. And what is now California, Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada etc., we all became part of Mexico. We were part of Mexico for about 25 years until the Mexican-American War The Americans won, we became part of the United States in 1848 and then we became a state in 1850.
So I want to go back to this 1822-1848 period because it's there that you can see the roots of what became Ventura County. When Mexico had governance of this area they were really working hard to populate it because they were very afraid that it was going to be taken away from them. Specifically from the French, the English and the Russians. So what the Mexican governor did in order to get people to come here is they started awarding ranchos and they awarded them to soldiers, to friends, to whomever. And during that time period 17 ranchos were created in Ventura County.
And many of the boundaries of those ranchos actually became the general boundaries of the cities that we know today. Except in this case, the 113,000 acre Rancho Simi ended up with not just one but two cities, two distinct cities, Simi Valley as we know and Moorpark. So why? What happened to that? So what happened and why did that happen? So the answer to that is partially topography, right? There's some like actual geographical boundaries But also, the creation of these two distinct communities can be traced through who purchased them and how and why.
So the original Rancho Simi was used as most ranchos were to raise cattle. This was an incredibly lucrative business during the Mexican era for every dollar that a ranchero spent raising and taking cattle up to the gold rush they earned about $15. Great return on investment at that time. But things began to fall apart in the 1860s with droughts and floods and droughts and floods.
And everything changed, the entire economics of Ventura County and the state changed forever. Land ownership, community, everything was altered and all the rancheros either sold or lost their ranchos. The same goes here in 1870 Rancho Semi was purchased by Thomas Scott whose agent was his nephew future US Senator Thomas Bard. They bought Rancho Semi looking for oil didn't find it And ultimately, they created the Simi Land and Water Company. And the goal with that was to chop up the rancho and sell it to farmers in small lots. And they sold about 100 or even fewer acres. They were going to sell them for about $10 to $100 per acre. They were not roaringly successful. However, this is where Simi came from. Many of you maybe know about Cineopolis, which was a small colony made to order house kits.
And people from Chicago came out, about 13 families in a two block radius, about eight miles from here they built these houses in the 1880s and that is the genesis of Sidney Valley today. But ultimately they didn't sell that many lots. So when the company disbanded, the unsold property was parceled out to the partners in that company. One of those partners was a man named Robert Poindexter who lived in LA and he received the western part of the rancho where we are standing right now.
Truthfully if Robert Poindexter had been a different type of person, we would not be here. Honestly, who knows what would have happened? We might've been a little bit separate. Anything could have happened but Robert Poindexter and his wife Madeline came, laid out the plot of the town, they built a depot, they built a train station and by 1904 Moorpark had really been created. And I was at the Rotary last week and I said thank goodness he named it for an apricot and not for himself because we could all be, you could all be living in Poindexter California, so now you just have what a road and a park I think still name for that.
At this point families and farmers started moving to the area and one of those farmers was the father of Monroe Everett. I bring him up because we did an oral history with him in 1989 six years before he died. A little bit about Monroe Everett His grandfather was a pioneer who came to California from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Trained in New York. Freight shipped him down to Panama. Mule wagon across the Isthmus. Freight up to San Francisco. Spent a little time in the gold fields and came down to Ventura County. So many of our people ended up here that way.
And in about 1902 he had purchased 1800 acres and became one of the largest apricot producers in the area. Monroe was born in 1902, their house in Moorpark was about three miles out of town so until his parents bought a car in 1917 they went everywhere by foot or on horseback. They had no electricity until 1918 when Edison finally put a line in out to their house.
Another oral history that we collected about 20 years ago was with Transito Corralejo When Moorpark grew into an agricultural powerhouse, Transito's mother and father moved into the growing community to harvest the apricots and walnuts. And the harvest was a family affair. So he tells us that when the harvest was on, he and his other kids in the neighborhood would go to school during the day and then they would leave and they would all go out and harvest the apricots every afternoon.
So the Museum of Ventura County has thousands of stories like this and they help us to remember, oh these are by the way this is all the apricot harvesters on Monroe Everett's father's ranch. But these stories help us to remember that when a city like this is created it is really created by people like this I think that we tend to forget that Now, that's what we are all about. And our job now is to continue gathering these stories, to continue gathering what's happening right now because it will be history in another 125 years when somebody who's not me comes and talks to people who are not you. Okay? We won't be here.
We have an initiative right now which we're very positive about. We've written a grant To create more oral histories specifically for Moorpark residents using or working with students at Moorpark College. We have about 450 oral histories and only about six from Moorparks so clearly this is something that we need to do and that brings me to ask I'm not here just to talk about the museum. I'm here to ask you to help guide us to gathering the stories of today.
The easiest way to do that is to Get more oral histories, and we would love to hear from you who you think the community leaders are or the non-community leaders whose stories we should be getting today. And also to get photographs. So this QR code that's right here is just... You can go right in there and submit photographs, and they will give us all the details about them, and they will go into our archives as well as a bunch of other ideas, ways that we can partner together either formally or informally. And that brings me to my end. I would just like to say we have new exhibits opening on June 5th. We hope that you can come up and see them at the Ventura Museum, and thank you for all you do to guide this community.
