Santa Clarita History Center

Everything old is new again – and that’s what’s happening at Hart Park in Newhall.
Heritage Junction – where 8 historic buildings and a steam engine and caboose are on display to the public – has officially been renamed “Santa Clarita History Center” and a new logo designed and adopted.
“We’re creating an entirely new experience for visitors to the park,” said SCV Historical Society President Alan Pollack. “This is an exciting time for the Historical Society. We’re evolving into a professional museum organization with full-time staff and best practices for collections care. We’re giving our museum campus in Hart Park a fresh makeover with professionally designed exhibits for a better and more meaningful visitor experience. ‘Santa Clarita History Center’ conveys who we are and what we’re doing.”
“Those of us who’ve been involved with the Historical Society for a long time feel a sense of nostalgia for ‘Heritage Junction,’ but we’re turning corners and striving to serve a community that has changed and grown at least three-fold since we founded our museum nearly 50 years ago,” said Leon Worden, Society Vice President and overseer of the restoration efforts. “We need to make sure we’re connecting with the people who live here today and living up to their expectations. A lot of towns and cities across America have ‘History Centers.’ Newcomers and visitors immediately have an idea of what they’ll find there, just from the name. As we see it, ‘Santa Clarita History Center’ is our future, and the new name is just the first of many exciting new things to come.
The new logo, designed by former Disney art director Greg Wilzbach, is a bold departure from the vintage design used since the Society’s founding in 1975.
“Santa Clarita has a huge amount of diverse history!  Designing a logo that captures it all with a more contemporary graphic design, was quite the challenge,” Wilzbach said. “After attempting to design one graphic image to represent everything I decided to try to graphically represent, with multiple images, some of the most recognized aspects of our history: indigenous peoples (the sun coming up over the land in the center of the logo), agriculture, oil, railroads, mining, and film making.  I also wanted to incorporate the color palette established for the Old Town Newhall campaign.  Hopefully this new logo will help represent a new phase in bringing our rich history to life.”