The Haggin Museum, A Gold Rush Fortune in a Valley City
Near Stockton, California
The Haggin Museum opened in Victory Park on June fourteenth, nineteen thirty-one, and it has never quite fit the city around it. That is not a criticism. It is a geographic curiosity: one of the more significant collections of nineteenth-century European and American painting in the American West, installed in a mid-sized Central Valley city, because of the peculiar arc of a fortune made in the California Gold Rush.
James Ben Ali Haggin was born in Kentucky in eighteen twenty-two, trained as a lawyer, and arrived in California in eighteen fifty, one year into the rush. He did not mine. He invested. His firm, which eventually operated as Hearst, Haggin, Tevis and Company, became one of the largest mining concerns in the United States, with gold, silver, and copper operations across Utah, South Dakota, and Montana. Haggin spent part of his fortune acquiring paintings to decorate a sixty-one-room mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Bouguereau panels, Bierstadt landscapes, Rosa Bonheur canvases, the collection that ended up in Stockton began as wall decoration for a house.
After Haggin's death in nineteen fourteen, his descendants arranged for the collection to come to Stockton, where the museum that bears his family's name was built to hold it.
The museum today also houses a restored Holt Seventy-Five Caterpillar tractor, which is perhaps the most Stockton object in any building in the city. The painting collection and the tractor sit a few galleries apart, a Gold Rush fortune and the machine that delta farming made necessary, sharing the same roof.
