Pleasanton residents appreciate the city's strong community spirit, which has been lauded nationally. Many factors contribute to that sense of community. One important influence is Museum on Main, which has long celebrated the City of Pleasanton and its history by working to enrich community life through education and by preserving, clarifying, and disseminating information about history specific to the Tri-Valley region. Local history museums such as Museum on Main play an important role in their communities, according to experts.

"Museums have the power to create unity on both a social and political level, but also on a local one," writes culture journalist Rebecca Carlsson. "Local museums are able to provide a sense of community and place by celebrating a collective heritage, offering a great way to get to know the history of a particular area."

Caroline Klibanoff, Managing Director of a coalition of more than 100 history museums called Made By Us, agrees on the value of such institutions. "If we don't pay attention to history museums and historic sites as they lead the charge toward responsive, urgent, civic-oriented work, we miss out on key resources for our lives, our communities, and our nation," she notes in the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association. "As we find ourselves in moments of crisis that demand context and knowledge, history museums and sites are hubs for civic and community engagement."

A Legacy of Accomplishments

In November, Executive Director Jim DeMersman will retire from the Museum on Main after 13 years as its leader. He will leave behind a legacy of accomplishments. Annual visitation grew from 9,000 in 2009, when DeMersman joined the museum, to more than 30,000 in 2019, the year before the pandemic began. In 2019, the museum also met a key goal of its strategic plan by renovating the permanent history gallery. The permanent gallery now combines "state-of-the-art digital technology with traditional objects and graphics to tell a more complete, accessible, and inclusive history of the Pleasanton area," according to officials.  

Renovating the permanent history gallery was one of his top priorities, according to DeMersman. "The community deserved to have a museum that they could be proud of and that would actually tell them the whole story and make sure that in telling that story we honored all of the people who made this community what it is," he says. "We spent a lot of time on how we told the story and making sure that we told it appropriately and accurately."

Under DeMersman's guidance, museum membership has increased. Its flagship program, the award-winning Ed Kinney "An Afternoon/Evening With …" event, grew its fan base and became popular far outside of the Tri-Valley area after it transitioned to an online program in response to the pandemic. The museum has also developed a robust temporary exhibit program, including some from the Smithsonian, that has broadened the topics available to members and visitors while still staying true to its mission to focus on the life and history of Pleasanton and the Tri-Valley. Moreover, the museum has developed vibrant programming for families and children, audiences that had been largely neglected before DeMersman arrived.

With the support of the Museum Board, countless volunteers, a part-time staffer, and the local community, DeMersman, Director of Education Sarah Schaefer, and Curator Ken MacLennan have built a local history museum with programming that belies its size. "When I tell colleagues at other museums about what we do and how we do it, they are sometimes aghast that we function like a medium-sized museum when we are actually tiny. To do all the things that we do makes them scratch their heads a little and wonder how we do it. We do it with a dedicated staff, a dedicated board, and dedicated volunteers. We couldn't do it without any of those particular elements. And we have a community that responds."

Community Focus to Continue

After DeMersman leaves, Schaefer will become the new Executive Director. "A lot of things will stay the same," she says, including temporary exhibits "that aren't always just about history but about a wide variety of different topics that might interest the public so we can be a place for the public to gather and learn about different things every year."

One challenge facing the museum is the size of its growing collections. "The museum is in a beautiful building in the middle of downtown but it has limited storage space," notes Schaefer. "We need to come up with a storage solution because we're always collecting more from people, and we want to. That's our role, but we need a bigger storage facility to be able to continue to do that into the future." A less urgent challenge is "making people more aware of what we are collecting and increasing our ability and capacity to acquire and manage digital collections."

Nonprofessionals might be surprised by the range of items, physical and digital, collected to document Pleasanton and the region. The museum accepts items that might seem trivial to those outside the profession but that are truly important for giving visitors a feeling for a time and place that may be gone, according to Schaefer. Amador High School is changing its band uniforms, for example, and museum staff were delighted to get an outdated uniform as a donation. Boy Scout patches are part of the collection. So are letters sent home by a local Boy Scout, away at camp during the 1950s, who missed his hamster and asked his mother to send cookies.

Because the Museum on Main is located downtown, Hacienda tenants and residents may have missed its benefits. Schaefer encourages the Hacienda community to visit the exhibits, take advantage of the programs, and also consider setting aside objects connected to the founding of Hacienda and Pleasanton-based businesses or documenting related stories through oral histories. After the museum's storage space increases, Schaefer also hopes to establish a system for capturing local stories, including those involving businesses. "If we can capture those now, we don't have to try and backtrack in one hundred years and ask what was it like when Hacienda opened."

The museum presents a host of programs geared to families and children, as well as  hybrid programs that take place online and in person that make it possible for people outside of the region or individuals with mobility issues to benefit. Current and upcoming exhibits include The Home Stretch: Horse Racing at the Fair, which runs until June 20 and examines horse racing at the Alameda County Fair over the past 150 years. California Votes: Exercise Your Right! runs from August 16 to October 8 and breaks down the importance of voting, demystifies referendums and ballot measures, and highlights political ephemera in the museum's collection. Her Side of the Story: Tales of California Pioneer Women, which runs from  November 2  to December 30, highlights first-person stories from the women who traveled by land or sea to settle in California prior to statehood.

Officials at Museum on Main agree on the value of sharing stories as a community. "This is not my museum," notes DeMersman. "It's not Sarah's museum. It's not our board's museum. It's here for the community."

"We are really here for you," says Schaefer. "We encourage you to stop in, to say hello, and to connect with us."

For more information about Museum on Main, please visit www.museumonmain.org.