California History Plan: Executive Summary
If California’s population continues to grow at its current rate, we will have 50 million residents by 2040. This growth places tremendous pressure on the state’s remaining prehistoric and historic sites. Public ownership
California History Plan: Executive Summary
If California’s population continues to grow at its current rate, we will have 50 million residents by 2040. This growth places tremendous pressure on the state’s remaining prehistoric and historic sites. Public ownership, easements, and historic preservation ordinances protect many of these properties. However, our collection of publicly-owned resources lacks sites that embody some key concepts and themes important to a complete representation of California’s history. If California is to safeguard its cultural heritage in a way that presents a truer picture of itself, then public and private preservation interests must work together to acquire, protect, and interpret many more of our prehistoric, ethnographic and historic places.
In November 2002, leaders in the preservation movement gathered at the Cultural Heritage Resources Summit to assess the status of historic and cultural resource preservation in California. One of the goals of the Summit was to develop a common agenda for preserving California’s cultural heritage.
Subsequently, Director Ruth Coleman committed California State Parks to updating the California History Plan, first published in the 1970s. She directed that the revised History Plan should describe what is missing from California’s preserved cultural heritage, and describe how the gaps could be filled.
Updating the History Plan presented a challenge. The original History Plan treated California’s history as a sequence of