I thought our class time in the MASC was really interesting today. One of the books I noticed was a travel guide called something like "Pacific Coast Travels". It had a couple paragraphs written about most of the cities along the coast of California and a couple major inland locations. Being from San Diego, and having traveled around California I know about most of these places now. It was so interesting to me to read about San Diego in 1880, from a tourist attraction standpoint. It was described as a place with "ideal weather" never getting too hot, but being comfortably warm for most of the year and its major resource was its safe harbor that didn't get too many rough wakes. These things are basically the same today. It also stated, and astonished me, that the population was 2,600ish, when today it is above 3 million and my own high school that I graduated from had over 3,000 students. It blows my mind that the entire population of San Diego was smaller than the amount of people I went to school with. Another funny thing was that it had a little disclaimer about the possibility of large sharks off the coast and the fact that a swimmer had disappeared recently. Now, it is a well known understanding that there are great whites that breed off the coast in the deep water.
Finding this book really made me appreciate the archived books and all the insight they have to offer.
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I love looking over old books about things like population and weather and comparing it with how things are today. The MASC was fun, and wasn't the presentation guy a blast?
ReplyDeleteThat's a fascinating perspective, Allie, to compare the population and situation then with what you've personally experienced. It sounds as though _Pacific Coast Travels_ was designed to lure people to settle in San Diego (and it must have worked!).
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