I See by the Papers...

Santa Rosa schoolkids in the 1960s-70s may remember field trips to the museum. No, not to the place on Seventh street with its neoclassical architecture - that didn't open as a museum until 1985. Before that the schoolbus drove to a nondescript industrial building on Summerfield Road which was the “Codding Museum," although in truth it was mostly Hugh Codding's hunting trophy room.

Codding, it seems, had been blasting away on all continents (except Antarctica) since the late 1940s. "I don't say hunting is good," he told a biographer, "it's just the way I am. I don't play golf. Hunting and fishing I like because you get a little reward at the end. It's like a stick with a wienie on it."

Inside the “Codding Foundation Museum of Natural History” (as it was formally known) there were some four hundred stuffed animals or parts thereof. There were bears of all kinds in scary poses, a Bengal tiger and a leopard along with other animals that had menacing claws or antlers. There were entire walls of mounted heads and sometimes the big game wasn't so big; there was a South African dik-dik which was about the size of a cocker spaniel when Hugh killed it. There were glass eyes staring back at you from all directions. There were dioramas where the animals were arranged in something like their natural settings, except the animals never moved or blinked. It was like visiting a dead zoo.

That museum at 557 Summerfield Road was shared with the Sonoma County Historical Society, which rented the front lobby from Codding for $1/year. What was displayed in their room was mostly random old bric-a-brac better suited for an antique (or junk) store, as described in the previous article. But Codding was using the Historical Society's participation to lend his taxidermical souvenirs a measure of legitimacy. That motive was clearly on display in early 1963 when he went sought permission for a 5,000 sq. ft. building at the NW corner of Hoen and Farmers Lane. He told the Santa Rosa Planning Commission it was to be charitably offered to the Society while the "remainder would be devoted to items of natural history interest." That plan was scrapped later that year when Codding's tenant at the Summerfield Road address moved out, making a space of the same size immediately available. The Historical Society and Hugh's stuffed things moved in there and opened a few months later.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott