Museum curator keeps track of artifacts

Railtown 1897 State Historic Park curator Lisa Smithson stands in front of the historic roundhouse, one of only two operating in the country. Maggie Beck/Union Democrat

It’s a vast and varied assortment. Vast and varied like her life and career, which led her to the position of curator at Railtown 1897 State Park in May.

Smithson said she often wonders how she was lucky enough to arrive at her present place in life.

“I’m very grateful that everything I did seemed to prepare me for this,” she said. “It’s amazing. I just kept learning and doing what I loved, and it all fit together somehow.”

Smithson, 44, is part Choctaw Indian and was born in Oklahoma City, where her physician father had his first practice.

“It was an extremely impoverished area,” she said. “For my first 13 years, we lived in Texas on the border of Oklahoma.”
 

The house was filled with music. Her father and his family played instruments, while her mother was “an amazing homemaker and seamstress.”

“It was a very colorful childhood,” she said. “My parents’ friends were all physicians and their artsy wives. Some were multi-faceted painters.”

Her home life was in sharp contrast to the strict Bible Belt farm life she had when she spent summers with family members in Oklahoma. “It was quite mind-opening for a child,” she said.

When she was about a sophomore in high school, her parents split up. She went to Europe with a tour group, then returned to graduate from Oklahoma High School and the University of Texas in Austin with a fine arts degree.

“I studied foreign languages because I wanted to travel,” she said, “but I was more comfortable in overalls. During my summers in Oklahoma, I would haul hay, hunt and fix fences. I was not interested in being in the kitchen with the ladies.”

She was a fine art printmaker for 20 years, in the tradition of such artists as Rembrandt.

Her musical background and friends who lived in Columbia led Smithson to the Mother Lode. An accomplished fiddler, she traveled with the Austin Lounge Lizards to the Strawberry Music Festival for the first time in 1989.

She met the area’s local musicians there and decided to volunteer at the festival again the following year. She still goes every year.

In 1992, after graduating from college, she was ready for a new beginning and ended up moving to Sonora. She rented a big house and began selling her artwork, which she called narrative folk lore. She was also a disc jockey for KZSQ and KVML radio stations, known then as Lisa Jones.

She met Roger Smithson, now her husband, during the filming of “Back to the Future III” in western Tuolumne County. He lived in Los Angeles at the time and was a prop-maker for feature films.

They have two sons, Cyrus, 13, and Ott Henry, 10. She was a stay-at-home mom for four years, then worked at Los Angeles International Airport as a ramp agent. She was also a Waldorf school teacher for two years.

They returned to Columbia in 2005. He is the owner of Greenline Construction. Lisa got a part-time job working on the “Tin Barn” project in Columbia, where thousands of artifacts are protected in an environmentally controlled building.

She also became a member of Friends of Columbia State Historic Park, serving as its secretary-president for a year, and volunteered at the Columbia Diggin’s, an annual portrayal of life during the Gold Rush.

In 2006, she became curator of the Tuolumne County Museum, and worked there until this May, when she was hired at Railtown.

“I loved my time with the county,” she said. “I resigned the day before they would have had to let me go because of budget cuts. I will always be thankful that I learned so much about the county’s history there and for the great group of volunteers involved with that organization.”

Today Smithson is immersed in the challenge of trying to preserve Railtown’s history in the face of state budget cuts.

She also plays the fiddle on Columbia’s main street, plays traditional American and Irish folk music with the Honey Bunnies at a variety of venues, and teaches the art of printmaking in her spare time.

Roger Smithson plays banjo with the Rose Creek Ramblers.

She said Roger also finds time to manage a busy construction business, as well as their home and their children’s active schedules.

“He’s the soccer mom right now,” she said. “I did it in the beginning.”

As to how she ended up with what she considers a dream job, she credits a constant urge to learn.

“If I had to advise someone,” she said, “I would say to keep learning and doing what you love. If you can’t find a job doing what you like, volunteer to do it in your spare time. It may work into a job. It did for me.”