Teachers inspired Jordyne Atkins to love the past
Published in the Oct. 1-14, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
Jordyne Atkins tells a group about the Native Americans of the Morgan Hill region. The Sobrato sophomore volunteers her Saturdays leading tours.
Photo by Marty Cheek
Jordyne Atkins loves history. The 14-year-old Ann Sobrato High School sophomore spends several hours nearly every Saturday taking visitors on a guided tour of the Villa Mira Monte estate where they learn about the history of the house and how the town pioneer Hiram Morgan Hill gave his name to the city we live in today.
As a docent tour guide with the Morgan Hill Historical Society, Atkins said that visitors often tell her stories about the people in the town’s past. One time, an 87-year-old woman came into the museum to buy a history book about the town and saw the exhibit on Charles Kellogg, a local resident who was famous on the Vaudeville circuit a century ago as “The Nature Singer” because he could accurately imitate bird songs.
“She said that she remembers Charles Kellogg,” Atkins said. “And she said, ‘When my brother was a baby … he was a very fussy baby and when my parents worked in the orchards, Charles Kellogg was the foreman of the orchard they worked in. And Charles Kellogg came in and sang to him as a bird. And my brother would calm down and go to sleep.’ The way she told it, I felt like I was right there.”
Thanks to the involvement of Atkins, the historical society has recently started an endeavor to encourage local families to come to the Villa Mira Monte complex on Monterey Road. In an hour or two, parents and children can learn together the story of the people who helped make Morgan Hill the city it now is, said Kathy Sullivan, president of the society.
“When kids have knowledge of where they come from and better information about their surroundings, it makes them more curious about life,” she said. “They can then compare their own world to the world and the lives of others and appreciate that people before us struggled.”
Families visiting Villa Mira Monte can enjoy the history museum and the Queen Anne-style home built by Diana and Morgan Hill in 1884 as a country retreat from the social pressures of San Francisco. The buildings are only open for tours Fridays and Saturdays, but the Villa Mira Monte grounds are open every day from dawn to dusk, allowing visitors to enjoy more than 250 varieties of roses as well as a “centennial history trail,” a circle maze of nearly 100 signs describing in chronological order the highlights of the region’s history starting with the arrival of the Native Americans thousands of years ago. Families are encouraged to bring a picnic to the grounds and eat on the well-manicured lawns as they discover what life was like in Morgan Hill’s past, said Ellie Weston, a volunteer with the the historical society.
“I think there is so much history here in the museum itself that is interesting for young people,” she said. “Visitors enjoy looking at the old dolls and the old toys that were from back in the days. It just encourages more children to come and visit. We’ve had some children who come and visit with the school field trips, and they’ve been so impressed with the field trips that they come back with their family and give their parents a tour of the house.”
On a September Saturday morning, three Monte Vista Christian seventh grade students visited to research Morgan Hill’s history for a school project on discovering their hometown.
Atkins gave a tour of the history museum to Alayna Matthews, 12, Cassidy Schurman, 13, and Morgan Mali, 12, who kept snapping photos of historical artifacts with their smart phones in their research on what life in Morgan Hill was like a century or so ago.
“People were very creative back then,” Matthews observed, describing how people in the past had to make do with making their own toys, clothes and other items. “People should learn more about Morgan Hill’s past because it’s very interesting.”
“It’s really cool, I didn’t realize that Morgan Hill grew up from a small town,” said Schurman. “I think (the Hills) would be pretty impressed by how the town has built up from what they did and how much history we preserved from them.”
Mali encourages local young people to visit the museum with their families because they will discover many surprises about what life was like for people in the area long ago.
“Kids need to learn more about their town and what is here because you can say, ‘Oh, my town has all these amazing things,’” she said. “When we first saw all this stuff, I went ‘Wow!’ These people took this town where there was no civilization and they made this huge place where everyone could come.”
Atkins first got involved with the historical society last fall when she worked as a Sobrato High School Interact Club volunteer at a public tour of the Rhoades House, a historic residence in Morgan Hill. Her passion for history soon led her to become a docent at Villa Mira Monte and share with visitors the delight of learning what happened in Morgan Hill’s past. During her training, she was amazed at the richness of the city’s history, she said.
“Before, I never went deeper than what we were told in school, which was Hiram and Diana Hill were a lovely couple who lived in Morgan Hill and they gave the town its name. That’s all I’d known up to that point,” she said. “I started working here in January and I discovered, wow, there’s so much more history here than that.”
From her docent training, she learned that the community’s depot stop was originally called “Huntington Station,” but people kept requesting that the conductor stop at “Morgan Hill’s place.” So over time, the first name was dropped to favor the name of the man who with his wife owned a ranch in the area.
Atkins’s love of history comes from the fact that her family has been in Morgan Hill for many decades and that she had several teachers who were passionate about the subject.
She especially credits Megan Winchell and Sandra Sansbury for their enthusiasm in bringing history to life for students — and making her consider teaching history herself some day.
“They loved history,” she said. “And being so enthusiastic about history made me want to learn history. But in school, we don’t get a lot of time to study certain things. It was definitely my teachers who kick-started that whole, ‘Ooh, I want to kick-start people into learning a lot of history.’”
The teen is considering majoring in history at the University of Arkansas or even in England at Staffordshire or Oxford universities, she said.
The young docent gives advice for parents to get their children engaged in local history because it’s a fun activity to learn about the details of their town’s story.
“A lot of new comers come in who’ve just moved to Morgan Hill,” she said. “I had one as recent as five days living in Morgan Hill and they heard about the historical society, and they came in and took a tour.
Taking a tour at the Villa Mira Monte site provides an opportunity for young people to learn about what happened in Morgan Hill and appreciate the modern times, she said.
“We need to learn history,” she said. “Without knowing what happened in the past, we’re going to do the same thing … because we didn’t pay attention to everyone who came before us.”
