Seeing Santa Barbara’s Past with New Eyes

A treasure trove of rare photographs chronicling Santa Barbara’s earliest days has been liberated from a corner of the Central Library archive room and uploaded to a public website for all to admire and explore. “These photographs have been locked away in a file cabinet for over 60 years,” said Library Director Jessica Cadiente. “By digitizing them and making the images available online for free, we have not only preserved critical pieces of Santa Barbara history; we have made it available to anyone anywhere in the world.”

The collection of 2,500 or so images — dating all the way back to the first years of photography in the mid-1800s, when Ulysses S. Grant was president and State Street was a muddy thoroughfare of horses and carriages — depicts all corners of Santa Barbara life through the turn of the century. There are snapshots of Franciscan friars and De la Guerra descendants, the first Southern Pacific train and the old Potter Hotel, Fiesta celebrations and earthquake destruction.

The main building blocks of the series came from a man named Edson Ashley Smith. Born in 1887 along the waterfront near where Stearns Wharf now stands, Smith was the son of county undersheriff Rufus Dana Smith. After an early career as a bookkeeper for the United Electric Gas & Power Company, Edson Smith served as secretary of the Santa Barbara Club for 43 years. Throughout his lifetime, he amassed a collection of historic photographs, taking special pride in images of the city’s original adobes, construction of the downtown Fountain Saloon, and of a poll tax receipt that proved Richard Jenkins paid county treasurer R. Carrillo three dollars in 1857 for the right to vote.