After returning from Vietnam, Pat Hathaway took up photography. Beyond that, he began collecting photographs from throughout history, unearthing images wherever he could find them – homes that sold where realtors were dumping stuff was a key source of images.
“Pat was a dumpster diver,” says Kent Seavey, a friend of Hathaway’s and a historic preservation consultant.
Hathaway eventually amassed some 80,000 images, roughly 60 percent of them from Monterey County, dating back to the 1880s. When he died unexpectedly at age 72 in 2021, he left behind an organized trove of photographs, mostly in plastic sleeves in binders that filled filing cabinets throughout his Pacific Grove house – they were everywhere, from the bedroom to the living room, Seavey says.
Seavey was appointed by the court as administrator of Hathaway’s estate, and then began to search for a home for these photographs. University libraries were one option, but he found a location close to home: the Monterey County Historical Society’s archives in Salinas. Over two days last spring, Cardinalli Movers loaded cabinet after cabinet, preserving the order, and moved the collection to a secure, temperature-controlled room. (The fire suppression system here does not use sprinklers.)
“You rarely find a collection intact,” Seavey says. “In this instance, not only intact, but serialized.” The benefit is that historians can make sense of what they have, instead of starting from scratch and trying to place an image in geography and time period. “If you have a soup sandwich, it’s going to take you 10 years to fix it. When you consider the amount of money it would take to do this from scratch… ”
As to money, the Historical Society hopes to raise $1.2 million, and plans to pay an image curator roughly $60,000 a year. Hathaway uploaded roughly 38,000 photos to the internet, licensing them for a fee. That system now generates about $800 a month for the nonprofit Historical Society.
Historical Society Executive Director James Perry pulls one of thousands of binders from the shelf, this one packed with images of the Chinese village at Point Alones in Pacific Grove, before and after a devastating fire in 1906. Some show fishing boats lined up neatly on the beach; others, men walking through rubble after the fire. Some reveal crowds of residents, others the captivating eyes of a person, more than 100 years ago, staring straight at the viewer today. “This is a deeply haunting case study, where countless lives were ruined,” Perry says.
Perry presides over an already-large collection of records – giant volumes of census and naturalization and court records, plus historic Salinas newspapers – that occupy the shelves of this vault. The Hathaway collection now fills a second room. “We all would’ve been deeply haunted had this collection left [Monterey County],” he says.
The nonprofit Historical Society’s pledge is to make the collection entirely viewable to the public. Just outside the vault of records, there is a remodel underway, making a spare, white-walled room into an ornate, Victorian-style space. A stained glass window that reads “216” from 216 Main St., the Grand Saloon built in 1905, rests in one narrow window. A wooden-framed fireplace is front and center, and a chandelier made in 1880 for kerosene (since electrified) is set to replace a mundane light fixture. “Our vision is to establish a library that time-travels you back to the 1880s,” Perry says. “It’s going to be just beautiful.”
From this future reading room – estimated to open in spring 2023, at a cost of $340,000 – visitors should be able to visit and request records from the adjacent vault, and page through.
Part of what Perry plans to do is to add the story of Hathaway himself to these volumes. “He wasn’t just a collector of photographs, he was an amazing photographer in his own right,” Perry says.