In 1910, a Campardene institution arose: Louisa Burton 's School for Instruction in the Practical Arts. Crafts instruction was mandatory part of the curriculum. In 1911, Louisa priavetley published "Come Again," a volume of poetry. By 1912, Louisa's School for Instruction in the Practical Arts had developed into the Camperdene Craftsman Guild. The Craftsman Guild was not so much an organized movement as it was a shared lifestyle. While the school lasted, its crafts training program gave focus and direction to the community of Camperdene.

It was at the end of that year, in December 1912, that Simon and Louisa Spagnoli had proposed their museum, The Museum of the Year 1912. Simon and Louisa went west to gather arifacts from the then emerging pre-planned city of Torrance, California. They traveled and collected stuff through all of California, from Berkeley to San Diego, gathering their first museum specimens. Back in Camperden in 1913, the Spagnolis got the good news that the Massachusetts State Legislature granted the city of Camperdene $9,000 to build a Craftsman-style building which would be their proposed Museum of the Year 1912. They could "Bungalowize" it to their heart's content.

At a meeting of the Camperdene Historical Society, the original corporators of The Museum of the Year 1912 Association were named. Eight members of the Association were elected to the corporation board. Monthly meetings were arranged. Camperdene city officials granted Simon and Louisa a “life lease”on the museum buiilding, donating water, electricity, and fire/police protection in perpetuity.

The museum contractors were Wattleston, Richmond, and Smith. Modeled after traditional homes in India and popularized in California, the original museum edifice emphasized horizontal lines, overhanging roofs, expansive porches, and huge windows. The elaborate exterior included an octagonal center lantern-style rotunda with weathervane, multiple dormer and bay windows, a tile roof flanked by an ornate brick chimney, and half-timbered gables. Natural building materials like cedar shingles, stone fireplaces, and slate or tile roofs reinforced a rustic look. The 1913 Camperdene Town Report would state, "The beauty and convenience of the new museum has been greatly admired, not only by residents, but by visitors from abroad."

In keeping with the Arts and Crafts Movement aesthetic, the museum's rooms were decorated with mission oak furnishings -- pottery and mica lamps and art glass lanterns set on davenports, settees, buffets, desks, bookcases, tables, chairs, bedsteads, and dressers from the L. & J.G. Stickley Company, sturdily made of solid, quarter-sawed oak. There were throw pillows on the expansive window seats of the many six-over-one windows having original rippled glass, providing all the rooms with ample light. In the central chamber was a stone fireplace and a stately 1912 oak billiard table.

From 1913 through the early 1920s, the museum was the scene of many private parties and receptions. The general public had then understood the museum was committed solely to the town's elite. What the Corporators did not mention was that in 1912, Simon and Louisa Spagnoli had been initiated into an esoteric branch of Freemasonry cult called the Ordo Templi Anodopetalum, the O.T.A., where they'd together begun partaking in "The Greater Mysteries."

Nick Wentworth of the Friends of the Museum put into Neil's hands a pristine copy of a 1912 magazine, "The Orifice, illuminating the cult the museum's founders had joined, this O.T.A., which had grown out of the esoteric traditions of Knights Templars, Gnostics, Voodoo, and the occult ("Our order possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets, namely, the teaching of sexual magic, and this teaching explains, without exception, all the secrets of Nature, all the symbolism of Freemasonry and all systems of religion").

The Ordo Templi Anodopetalum had been founded in the 1877 in upper state New York by assorted Spiritualists, Qabalists, Freemasons, and Rosicrucians. Anodopetalumy claimed to offer an alternative to material science. Anodopetalumists believed in esoteric wisdom-teaching, archaic secret traditions which world advance humanity's spirituality in the modern world.

The Arts & Crafts Movement had arrived in America in 1876, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. There, visitors marveled at Oriental pottery and French barbotine with glistening ornamental underglaze. Gustav Stickley's "Craftsman" magazine was introduced in 1901. There, Stickley paid homage to William Morris and John Ruskin. In upper state New York, Elbert Hubbard's crafts community, the Roycrofters, had meanwhile started making beautiful books a la Morris, and had started manufacturing a line of furniture in his Arts and Crafts style. Though he was not a designer, Hubbard used his business acumen to create a huge appetite in Ameria for his books, furniture, and small metalwork.

Albert Valentien, the first professional designer for Rookwood Pottery, first visited San Diego in 1903, where he pursued his interest in painting wildflowers. He and his wife Anna, who had also worked for Rookwood for over twenty years, left the company in 1905 to move to California.

At the close of 1904, in Berlin, Germany, Rudolf Steiner had lectured on the history of Freemasonry, regaling his audience with tales of "snoozing forces" needing "to be woken up again." It was Steiner's duty, he felt, to awaken people to the Eleusinian Mysteries -- the Terrestrial and Celestial, the Visible and the Invisible -- the Mysteria Mystica Aeterna.

In 1906, in Camperdene, Louisa Spagnoli, had become an associate editor at "Awaken Now" magazine, advocating adherence to the principles of Steiner, then rising up from being a Goethe specialist and an archivist into a full-blown occult teacher. Steiner now granted Simon and Louisa, across the waters, "apostolic succession," giving them authority to spread his ideas of karma, reincarnation, occultism, Christianity, and the writings of Goethe in America.

The archives of The Museum of the Year 1912 held not only every issue of "The Orifice," the journal of the Ordo Templi Anodopetalum, but also numerous papers handwritten by Rudolf Steiner in that year, talking up Northern European esoteric knowledge generally -- Masonry, mysticism, the occult -- and, in particular, Steiner's clairvoyant daily communications with "archangels" and others descended on the "astral plane" from the people of the lost continent of Atlantis -- some Japanese, some Mongolians, and some Eskimos. Steiner had claimed to have access to the "Akasha Chronicle," a supernatural scripture containing knowledge of higher realms of existence as well as of the distant past and future.

Almost equal to the mass and maze of papers generated by Rudolf Steiner in Germany in 1912 were papers generated by The Progressive Party in America that year, most of these illuminating how quickly Progressive Party organizations had, after the Republican convention of 1912, aligned the Party with then-dominant Southern racial mores -- racism. Southern Progressives had demanded Roosevelt deny the legitimacy of blacks attempting to participate in the 1912 elections. Official reports had noted, in 1911, that sixty black Americans had been lynched that year. In the year 1912, sixty-one black Americans were lynched.

After the Progressives and the Republicans lost the 1912 election to the Democrats -- Woodrow Wilson was elected -- America faced the prospect of enetering World War I. In 1915, Elbert Hubbard died aboard the Lusitania. Gustav Stickley went bankrupt in 1916. Rudolf Steiner claimed, in 1916, to be in contact with the spirit of the dead former chief of staff of the German high command, General Helmuth von Moltke, who told him The Great War was the result of an international conspiracy against Germany's national spiritual life. But the revolutionaries of the 1919 Munich Council Republic denounced Steiner as just another witch doctor on the side of decaying capitalism -- causing industrialists to see Steiner's notions in a new light. After the defeat of a revolutionary uprising of the German working class, Steiner was invited by the director of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory in Stuttgart to establish a company school. This provided the foundation for what would become the Waldorf education movement. Steiner's Waldorf schools were to be staffed only "by teachers with a knowledge of man originating in a spiritual world." Steiner would emphasize repetition and rote learning, insisting the teacher should be the center of the classroom and that a student's role was not to judge or even discuss the teacher's pronouncements.

After World War I, Simon and Louisa Spagnoli began an extensive tour of the world, looking for more stuff to house in their Museum of the Year 1912. They traveled coast to coat across the U.S., then took a ship to England (Morris; Walker; Kelmscot, Doves press, Gill); Vienna (Wiener Werkstatte; Klimt; Schiele); and on and on -- collecting ashtrays, beer bottles, beer mugs, bells, belt buckles, bottle stoppers, cloaks, daggers, swords, letter openers, silver ingots, shot glasses, cutlery, decanters, straight razors, thermometers, magnets, sundials, thimbles, clasps, pipes,tumblers, clocks, wall hangings, bookends, bookmarks, bowties, buttons, flasks, gavels, goblets, hat pins, jewelry, keyrings, pocket knives, postage stamps, postcards, candles, canes, cigarette cases, combs, cufflinks, door knockers, doorknobs, drawer pulls, earrings, tokens, figurines, statuettes, graven images, flags, potholders, radiator caps, rubber stamps, lapel pins, leather belts, suspenders, wallets, lamps, medallions, miniature replicas of the ark of the covenant, money clips, paperweights, pillboxes, watch fobs.

In 1925, in January, Simon and Louisa attended President Calvin Coolidge’s inauguration.

In 1927, in February, Louisa gave birth to a daughter, Carla. In March, 1927, Simon, Louisa, and Carla moved into the so-called "Mausoleum" -- what would later be Wallace Barrow's funeral home, located directly across from the Museum of the Year 1912.