Celebrate The Anna S. C. Blake Manual Training School

The Anna S. C. Blake Manual Training School Exhibit Opening Reception

Join us for an evening celebrating the history and legacy of the Anna S. C. Blake Manual Training School at Casa de la Guerra!  This free 1st Thursday event will live music and refreshments.

DATE & TIME: Thursday, March 7, 2018, from 5 PM to 8 PM

LOCATION: Casa de la Guerra

15 E De La Guerra St, Santa Barbara
FREE Admission
For more information (805) 965-0093 or www.sbthp.org

Celebrate the history and legacy of the Anna S. C. Blake Manual Training School at Casa de la Guerra. SBTHP will have an exhibition on loan from UC Santa Barbara Library available to the public at Casa de la Guerra from March 7 – May 31, 2019. In 1892, Anna S. C. Blake, a Bostonian who relocated to Santa Barbara, founded the Santa Barbara Sloyd School in the city’s downtown. The following year, the school moved into its new school building at 814 Santa Barbara Street (near De la Guerra Street) on the site of what is today the Anacapa School, located in El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park. Sloyd schools emphasized manual training and were closely linked to European folk art traditions and the Arts and Crafts movement. Renamed the Anna Blake Manual Training School after Blake’s death in 1899, the school remained grounded in the Progressive-era belief that all students should have access to a holistic education emphasizing both intellectual and practical knowledge in order to develop educated citizens.

The exhibition focuses on the school’s early years and explores how Santa Barbara reformers thought about the intersection of education, the manual arts, and social mobility in the 1890s, and the implications of those beliefs on higher education today. All exhibition photos are from UCSB Library’s University Archives Photographs collection. This exhibition was curated by Sarah Case, Managing Editor, The Public Historian, and Continuing Lecturer, History, and Nora Kassner, graduate student in History.

In celebration of the exhibition an opening ceremony will take place on 1st Thursday, March 7th, from 5-8pm at Casa de la Guerra (15 E De La Guerra St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101). A lecture by Dr. Sarah Case and Nora Kassner and co-sponsored by the UCSB History Associates will be held at Casa de la Guerra on Sunday, March 10th, at 2pm.

For more information, visit www.sbthp.org or call the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation at (805) 965-0093.