CURRENT EXHIBITS

Founding Parents:

From the Kumeyaay to the Lee House 

& 

A Sea of Lemon Trees

The Parsonage Museum of Lemon Grove, 3185 Olive, will reopen for the 2003 - 2004 season with two new exhibits, "Founding Parents:  From the Kumeyaay to the Lee House" and "A Sea of Lemon Trees."  

The exhibits will run through June, 2004.

"Founding Parents" traces community history from the late Stone Age, approximately 12,000 B.C., when the Kumeyaay first inhabited the area, to 1928 and the building of the H. Lee House, a Tudor Revival masterpiece that resulted in part from the surging popularity of the automobile.

The Kumeyaay of prehistory are depicted in large wall murals showing the unpolluted, pristine landscape that was home to more than 300,000 Native Americans.  The murals evoke the fatal impact of Spanish conquistadors and priests on the Kumeyaay whose numbers shrank to fewer than 20,000 as a result of disease, slavery, genocide and displacement from ancestral lands. 

The murals were painted by the museum's artists-in-residence, Kathleen Strzelecki and Janne LaValle, both noted painters and educators.

"The Kumeyaay:  At Home in the World" also features century-old woven baskets and pottery, fossils, pictographs, utilitarian gourds, and the plants and rocks that were central to daily life, belief system, and cultural practices.

The modern period begins in 1892 when Lemon Grove first appeared in the county records as a subdivision called "Lemongrove."  The founding of the school system, construction of the town's first church, establishment of the Lemon Grove Fruit Growers Association, and the building of prosperous orchards and large homes marked the next three decades.

Marketed as "San Diego County's most picturesque suburb" by the fledgling chamber of commerce, Lemon Grove sought to lure gentlemen farmers with its mild climate and year-round growing season.  Population growth led to more streets and streets led to vehicles and vehicles required paved surfaces. 

By 1928, Lemon Grove saw the paving of Main Street and the building of the H. Lee House by San Diego's Lee family, whose successful automobile dealership inspired them to drive into the countryside in search of the perfect site for an English-style country manor.

The dramatic changes in the 36-year span between 1892 and 1928 affected not only remote villages like Lemon Grove, but the entire world.  The industrial revolution, World War I, the start of automation, and the rise of the U.S. as a super power sent the late Victorian period headlong into the twentieth century with scarcely a backward glance.

The secondary exhibit, "A Sea of Lemon Trees" shows Lemon Grove's agricultural heyday when millions of tons of fruit were harvested and shipped to the Midwestern and eastern U.S.

The Parsonage Museum is located in Lemon Grove's first church, a redwood Folk Victorian that was renovated by the Lemon Grove Historical Society between 1997 - 1999.  It stands in Civic Center Park opposite the H. Lee House

The Parsonage is located at 3185 Olive Street in Lemon Grove and is open Fridays, 1 - 3 p.m., Saturdays, 10 - 4 p.m., and weekdays by appointment from 9 - 2:30 p.m. for groups of eight or more.  Admission is $2.  For more information, call the Historical Society at 619-460-4353.

     Artists in Residence

Pete Smith, Historian