In the spirit of the holiday season, the Governor’s Mansion at 16th and H streets in downtown Sacramento is once again preparing for its annual “Christmas Memories” event. And at the helm of this local attraction is the mansion’s curator and manager, Kendra Dillard.

For Dillard, who began serving full time in this position in April 2007, the event marks her favorite time of the year at the historic mansion, as the public can attend an entertaining and educational event in a festive environment.

“The first two Saturdays of December, we have the house open to the public [from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.] and we have costumed docents and staff people who are stationed in almost every room,” Dillard said. “[The docents] have Santa and Mrs. Claus in the main hallway in front of a Christmas tree and we can take pictures. I love seeing the little children who come in and see the decorations and then turn the corner and see Santa and Mrs. Claus sitting there. It’s just a really special event that always gets me in the Christmas spirit. It’s all about the children and it’s just so heartwarming to give people a glimpse backward in time and see what Christmases were like for the various governors’ families.”

Uniquely Californian Event
Dillard explained that the event covers an interpretive time period for the mansion, from 1903, when the state purchased the mansion to use as the Governor’s Mansion, until 1967, when the mansion’s last governor, Ronald Reagan, moved his family out of the building.

“Our costumed docents have the choice of depicting any of those time periods between 1903 and 1967,” Dillard said. “Some are dressed as the various family members and the governors. We usually have ‘Gov. Pardee,’ who was the first governor who lived here, at the front door to greet people as they come in. Then we may have [Gov. Hiram Johnson’s wife] ‘Mrs. Minnie Johnson,’ who was here in 1911 and she redecorated some of the house. She was the one who bought the furniture in the music room, so usually she’s the one who’s telling us about the music room. And throughout the house, there are various time periods of people, who may have lived in the mansion.”

Dillard added that the event lives up to its name, as it covers many Christmas memories that were experienced at the family house by not only the governors and their families, but also their extended families and the many people who worked at the mansion.

It is this event, as well as the mansion’s other large event of the year, its Halloween program, Dillard said, that helps make her position at the Governor’s Mansion a dream job.

“These are our two biggest events of the year,” Dillard said. “They are so much fun.”

But with large events or not, Dillard said that she is delighted with her role at the mansion. Her regular efforts include overseeing an extensive project to improve upon and open the mansion’s third floor to the public and the current exterior revitalization of the mansion, which is in the final stages of its $1.2 million deferred maintenance project.

“I love working here, it’s a blast,” Dillard said. “Working with historic house museums is really my specialty and has been for 20 years or more.”

Dillard’s Foundation
Dillard said her road to her current status with the mansion began during her childhood, while growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, where her family had lived for many generations.

“I spent a lot of time with my grandparents as a child and I always loved hearing stories about what life was like in history when they were alive,” Dillard said. “Then I had a really good history teacher in the seventh-grade and that’s when I decided that I wanted to be a history teacher. So, I went to college and majored in history and secondary education.”

Dillard’s dream to become a history teacher was short-lived, as she discovered during her internship in a high school that she had no idea how to deal with the discipline problems of the students.

With her love for history still intact, Dillard eventually landed a job with a small museum in Florida.

“[The position] was funded by a grant, so it only lasted a year, but that was enough to let me know that that was the perfect job for me, because I loved history and I loved education, but I didn’t like being in [a high school] classroom all day,” Dillard said. “After that I looked around for a graduate school to go to. I got a scholarship to go to the University of Minnesota, so I went to Minnesota and ended up staying there 18 years.”

During this time, Dillard earned a master’s degree in history and museum studies and worked at a small farm museum for three-and-a-half years.

She was later hired as the curator of historic sites for the Minnesota Historical Society, a position she held for 11 years.

Having become well-rooted in Minnesota, where she also met and married another University of Minnesota graduate, Stewart Haight, in 1994, Dillard eventually found herself in California, as Haight took a job in the Bay Area in 1998.

With her experience, Dillard was able to find work with the Oakland Museum of California and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Having enjoyed her time in Sacramento while working on a Gold Rush exhibit at the Memorial Auditorium through the Oakland Museum, Dillard said she was very excited when she was later hired as a part-time curator for both the Leland Stanford Mansion and the Governor’s Mansion in October 2006.

Six months later, when the mansion’s deferred maintenance project began, Dillard obtained her current status as the mansion’s full-time curator and manager, assuming the duties of supervising all workers of the mansion and caring for all artifacts, which includes the museum’s largest artifact, the building itself.

Home at the Mansion
Dillard, who with her husband has a blended family of four boys, Cole, 22, Clay, 20, and their 24-year-old twins, Alan and Brendan, who are all college students, said that she enjoys her spare time away from work.

With a smile on her face, Dillard, who is also the chair of the Historic House Museum Committee of the American Association for State and Local History, said that she encourages the public to visit the mansion during its “Christmas Memories” event.

“It will be a really fun time,” Dillard said. “Come see the house all decked out with her new facelift and her Christmas fineries.”