"Gold Fever!" Strikes Ocotillo! & Rotary Club Volunteer Day

Rotary volunteers and Interact members

This was a big day for the IVDM. This morning El Centro's Rotary Club and the Southwest High Interact Club spent Rotary's National Volunteer Day curating at the museum. Eusebio, who holds the museum's title for Most Artifacts Curated in One Day by One Person, challenged his Rotary peers to beat his record.
One person came close, but at the end of the day Eusebio still held the record at 181 artifacts. Over the intense cataloging session 17 people curated 348 artifacts in 3 hours. That's equivalent to a full days work by our CDAS partners. The staff sends a big thank you out to El Centro Rotary for organizing the event and helping us curate IVC's collections.

One of the 348 artifacts curated by El Centro Rotary and SW Interact Club. 

Later in the afternoon, visitors from Imperial County, Jacumba and as far as San Deigo helped us celebrate the grand opening of our first traveling exhibit. "Gold Fever! Untold Stories of California's Gold Rush". It's amazing to think that last January we just finished the curation lab and today we have a full exhibit up on the walls.

Nearly 100 people visited throughout the afternoon to eat tacos at the cart sponsored by the El Centro Rotary Club, listen to traditional cowboy music performed by El Centro's own Jugless Jug Band, and view the exhibit. Adults and children alike enjoyed testing their knowledge of the area and identifying good hiking areas our new
topographical map of San Diego and Imperial Counties.

Families enjoyed our miner's cabin and trying to identify different objects in the miner's trunk a miner would have brought with him for work and for fun.The Jugless Jug Band played timeless favorites like "Buffalo Girls" and "Little Brown Jug" and quizzed the museum staff on the historical meaning of each verse to "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain".  We didn't know nearly as much as we expected we would.

This exhibit opening represents an amazing milestone for us as a fledgling museum and the IVDM staff would like to thank everyone who has helped make this museum a reality.  Thank you to all of our visitors for coming out, and we hope to see more of you soon!