Coachella Valley History Museum Case Study

The Coachella Valley History Museum actually started with a man called Dr. Smiley. He made a house with adobe bricks and built that house in 1926. The house is now the main building of the History Museum. Smiley was a rich doctor that came here in 1920 when his car broke down and had to be repaired. When Dr. Smiley’s car was repaired he wanted to leave the valley but could not because he loved the valley do he built the adobe house. Dr. Smiley also worked in the railroad company like most people in the valley but, unlike other folk he was rich. He also built the house with a basement to stay in when the desert became hot.
The tour starts out with the Cahuilla Indians baskets, history, and then things that the Indians used for food and to hunt food. Then we moved to the second room filled with water saving projects and what type of fruit grows best here in the valley like oranges and dates. Then we moved to the Children’s room where the museum had things set up for kids like games and posters that had old cars and history of what people would wear in the valley in the old days like letterman jackets from La Quinta

There was also old relics of the Coachella valley railroad there. Then she took us to the old schoolhouse that is equipped with old school desks, blackboards and chalk that you can draw on, and a big blackboard that had numbers on the big blackboard. The schoolhouse was fairly big for those days. I believe it could hold 120 people. Then we went outside and the docent talked about the outhouse and the project of repairing the water tower because it was leaking. Then we went into the history of date growing museum. The docent talked about how hard it is to grow dates and how labor intensive it is to just pick the dates. The date museum was very interesting because I did not know much about the date gardens here in the