Arden Arcade Community Alliance

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Arden Arcade History Project

Background: The history of a community is critical to its identity. Since one of the Alliance missions is to promote a sense of community in Arden Arcade, we determined that we must understand how our area developed and grew into the thriving suburb it is. In an effort to learn the history of our community, Alliance members sought information from the Sacramento County Historical Society, only to find that there is no recorded history for the geographic area of unincorporated Sacramento County known as Arden Arcade, bounded on the south by the American River, the east by Mission Avenue, the north by the Capital City Freeway and Route 80 and the west by the Sacramento city limits. Even the book Sacramento: Gold Rush Legacy, Metropolitan Destiny, written about the city and county of Sacramento for Californias 150th anniversary, never references our area. Although the Rancho Del Paso Historical Society can provide some information about the early history of the area, there is little documentation about development throughout the 1900s.

How can we know where we are going if we dont know where we have been?

The Project: The Arden Arcade Community Alliance has initiated a project to collect the history of the area from various sources. The plans include:
  • Capturing oral histories from long time residents
  • Collecting community artifacts and photographs from residents and then creating displays for the two local libraries and other community gathering places.
  • Creating a Website to share the history of the area on-line.
  • Compiling the information into a book and/or CD Rom for use by schools when they study local history and for people researching the community.
  • Encouraging youth to write plays about the history of the area and then perform them.
We need your help!

To successfully record our history, community members of all ages must get involved. We need long time residents to share their memories of the area and persons to collect these important oral histories. We need people to research information at the libraries or dig through old newspapers and community records at the Sacramento Archives and Museum Collection Center. We need assistance setting up a system to record the artifacts gathered in order to be able to return them to residents, if requested. We need computer savvy people to scan in photos and documents for use on CD ROMs or in Power Point presentations. We need writers to compile the history in an orderly manner.

If you would like to help, please e-mail us at info@ardenarcade.org or phone our voice mail at 916-491-5250