Why Nominate the Shinn House and Park?
To Document, Preserve, and Develop the Shinn Family History
for Generations to Come
to Understand the Roots of Our Current Day Community

Thank you to all of these people who have helped gather, find, preserve or review the history recently and in the past: 

• Al Minard had the vision to kick off this project. He has volunteered at the Shinn House for many years and for other historical groups. He was involved in the moving of Shinn buildings - the Santos barn and China Camp.  

• Fifty years of members of Mission Peak Heritage Foundation who brought life to the Shinn House with preservation, tours, and events.

• Stuart Guedon whose map expertise comes in handy and knew the founder of Mission Peak Heritage Foundation.

• Dr. Robert Fisher founded Mission Peak Heritage Foundation to preserve historic buildings in the township. He also preserved many valuable photos, letters, and more which are at the Museum of Local History, the Fremont Main library, the Patterson House, and the Shinn House.

• Members of the Shinn family 

  • Vice Admiral Allen M. Shinn who wrote many messages on the backs of photos and helped his mother, Florence create Shinn Historical Park & Arboretum

  • The creation of the Shinn House Museum by the Shinn family.

  • The Fourth generation Shinn family who wrote about the family, saved important documents, or shared memories: Kathryn Kasch, James Shinn, Allen Shinn, Jonathan Shinn, Ann and Pete Ziegler, Elizabeth Terplan,  Frank Solinsky.

• Miriam Pawel, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author. She found us from a comment on an online UC Alumni article about women at UC Berkeley

• Janet Barton and Maggie Balk who were hooked by the Shinn family history while processing 110 letters written by Lucy Shinn to her daughter Milicent in the 1870s. They have gone through all of the Shinn archives at the Shinn House and the Museum of Local History and are starting on a project to organize and catalog them. Lots of tidbits of knowledge are held between them.  Janet was first enticed by the Shinn's early nursery, the early nurserymen organizations that overlap with the California Nursery Company.

• The Washington Township Museum of Local History volunteers and staff - Patricia Schaffarczyk, Barbara Baxter, Kelsey Camello. 

• Phil Holmes who wrote articles for the newspaper and interviewed many people, including Joshua Fong.

•  Joshua Fong and his family - Phil Holmes recorded Joshua and wrote an article about his family from Joshua's memoirs. Joshua's memoirs are priceless and include his cousins and uncles who worked at the Shinn Ranch and the California Nursery. Lena Fong, Joshua's widow, is a member of the Chinese Bunkhouse Preservation Project. Lena's daughter, Jill, and her husband Mike are founding members of the bunkhouse project.

• The Chinese Bunkhouse Preservation Project & the Chinese History Projects are sister projects which formed because of a desire to preserve the last bunkhouse of the Shinn China Camp and to learn more about the early Chinese immigrants since the 1860s.  

• Aaron Goldstein - tank house expert - who we found in a Berkeleyside article - visited the tankhouse after seeing how unusual it was.

• The Friends of Heirloom Flowers who have several important photos and have made the Shinn family's first home their garden club home. Several gardeners have personally made donations because they garden the historic gardens.

• Bruce and Sandy Roeding who attended the Williamson Outdoor School.

• Daniel daniel@historicbuildingsct.com  who wrote about "Historic Buildings of Connecticut" including many houses in Farmington where Lucy and her siblings grew up.

• And Finally a big thank you to Michael Corbett, who has written many documents on our local historic sites. His familiarity with our local history made him the perfect person for this project.  It's also fun to walk through old buildings to see what he sees with his architectural eye.