For years, children attending Valley Days at the San Joaquin County Historical Museum moved between activities scattered across the grounds of Micke Grove Regional Park.
They cooked biscuits on a wood-burning stove, pumped and carried water, washed clothes with scrub boards and tried their hands at blacksmithing and gold panning. During the rainy months, getting from one lesson to another could mean trekking through mud and dirt.
This month, those activities will move into Pioneer Village, a $4.5 million living history center nearly four decades in the making.
The recreated 19th-century town will make its public debut on Saturday as the museum celebrates its 60th anniversary. It will become the permanent home of Valley Days, Pioneer School and Farm-to-Fork, programs that teach children about San Joaquin County’s history, agriculture and daily life in earlier generations.
“When they come out here, it’s hands-on,” said Carole Pinnell, the museum’s director of education. “They’re pumping the water, they’re cooking over the wood in the cookhouse, they’re rolling out their biscuits.”
For Pinnell, the opening brings together two sides of her career. Before overseeing the museum’s educational programs, she taught in Lodi Unified School District and brought her own students to Valley Days and Pioneer School.
She said the weight of a water bucket, the coldness of the water and the work required to cook or wash clothes help children grasp lessons that can feel distant when presented only through books and classroom assignments.
“It really brings what they’ve been studying in the classroom to life for them,” Pinnell said.
Museum Executive Director Phillip Merlo said Pioneer Village grew from the needs of Valley Days, which is designed to transport third- and fourth-grade students into 19th-century San Joaquin County.
“Our Docent Council and Education Department have long dreamed of hosting the program in a high-fidelity environment,” Merlo said. “This is a response to those dreams.”
Designed as a recreated Western townsite, Pioneer Village includes a blacksmith shop, printing shop, cookhouse, grain mill and saloon, along with facades representing a bank, title company and seed company.
The Western-town setting represents one part of a broader county history. The museum describes San Joaquin County’s story as spanning the region’s Miwok and Yokuts peoples, generations of immigrant communities and the development of one of California’s major agricultural regions. Its mission includes preserving and interpreting the histories of the county’s cultures and people.
That history has long been taught through the museum’s hands-on programs. Since 1990, more than 140,000 students have participated in Valley Days and Pioneer School, according to a 2025 newsletter from San Joaquin County Supervisor Steve Ding’s office.
Valley Days introduces third- and fourth-grade students to activities associated with 19th-century life, including blacksmithing, rope making, cooking, laundry and gold panning. Pioneer School recreates a school day inside the Calaveras Schoolhouse, an original one-room school built in the 1800s, where children write on slates and receive a lesson from a schoolmarm.
Farm-to-Fork focuses on the county’s agricultural history and teaches students about planting, harvesting and selling crops.
Pioneer Village will bring many of those activities into one permanent setting, with hard walking surfaces and covered areas to protect students from rain and mud. Its location near the museum’s barn will also separate Valley Days from the main museum buildings and historic schoolhouse.
That separation will allow the museum to host multiple school groups and programs at the same time. Pinnell said that previously, a Valley Days group could occupy so much of the campus that the museum could not easily accommodate another school tour.
“Our footprint was too small,” she said.
The additional space could expand the number of children the museum serves. It will also allow the museum to run Farm-to-Fork or general tours while Valley Days is taking place elsewhere on the grounds.
The idea for such a space has circulated within the museum for nearly 40 years.
Merlo said the first documented discussion of a Pioneer Village concept occurred at a museum board meeting in 1987. The organization considered another plan in the late 1990s, but detailed planning did not begin until 2021.
That year, the museum worked with Doug Davis and Joel Rehbein of WMB Architecture to prepare a master facilities development plan. Merlo said market research, community input and the realities of construction led the museum to choose Pioneer Village as the first phase of a broader campus redevelopment.
The museum spent the next two years planning and designing the village before moving into permitting, bidding and construction in 2024 and 2025. The project was funded through county support, private donations, an estate bequest and money contributed by the museum.
The San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors provided a $1.6 million matching grant. County officials initially described Pioneer Village as a roughly $3.2 million project when the grant was announced. Merlo said the final investment reached $4.5 million.
The museum also received a $1 million bequest in 2024 from the estate of Sheila Wishek. Merlo said Wishek had previously expressed her desire to see the village built, prompting the museum to direct the money toward construction.
Additional funding came from earlier donors, local philanthropists and a capital campaign conducted in 2025 and 2026. The museum also paid for part of the project from its own funds.
Merlo described the village as a framework for educational programming rather than an exhibit built around one fixed account of the past. He said the curriculum draws from historical records from the 19th and early 20th centuries and is intended to represent the immigrant communities that contributed to the county’s development.
The opening comes 60 years after the San Joaquin County Historical Society began operating the museum at Micke Grove in 1966. The society itself was founded in 1954.
“For sixty years, the Museum has been a cultural asset for San Joaquin County,” Merlo said. “In our next 60 years, we hope to develop and provide San Joaquin County with world-class cultural and historical infrastructure. The Pioneer Village is our first proof of concept.”
The grand opening will mark the substantial completion of construction, although Merlo said some finishing work will continue for several months.
The free celebration will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. July 25 and include historical demonstrations, hands-on activities, bluegrass music and food vendors. Micke Grove Regional Park charges $6 per vehicle.
For Pinnell, the finished village exceeded the architectural drawings she had seen before construction. More importantly, it fulfills a vision carried for decades by the museum’s docents, the volunteers who built and sustained many of its educational programs.
“This dream has finally been realized,” she said.