Voices From The Past

Voices from the past
The Western Sonoma County Historical Society has partnered with California Revealed, a State Library initiative to help California’s public libraries to digitize, preserve, and to provide access to the audio recordings of our local citizens, called oral histories, which provides on line access to everyone.
Now the Historical Society can offer, to the public, the opportunity to listen to these amazing recordings in full length right from the comfort of your living room. They can be heard by visiting www.archive.org or www.californiarevealed.org. When at the sites just do a search for Western Sonoma County Historical Society and click on our logo.
The subjects of the recordings include railroad history, agriculture, businesses, the 1906 earthquake, and schools. Some of the Museum staff’s personal favorites are: William Borba, who was Sebastopol’s historian who also had a large photographic collection; Jack Fore, a local banker who knew the stories of many people and businesses; Richard Keil, who tells of his memories of the Luther Burbank Experiment Farm as his father (employed by the Stark Bros) took over management of the Farm; and Virginia Sustarich, who was the woman in charge at the time the Speas Distillery was shut down and knew the history of the plant.
The words of these folks and all the others are a real treasure that everyone will enjoy.