Arcadia Public Library, Arcadia History Collection

The Arcadia History Collection is a repository of photographs, scrapbooks, city directories, newspapers on microfilm, and ephemera documenting the history of the City of Arcadia. Its archival holdings include a bound volume, with photographs, of the issues published in 1918 and 1919 of the Arcadian Observer, the official newspaper of the United States Army Balloon School in Arcadia; issues (on microfilm) of the Santa Anita Pacemaker, a newspaper written and published by Japanese Americans while interned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center for the Japanese in 1942, along with a collection of photographs taken at the assembly center by the War Relocation Authority in 1942; photographs and materials about the Santa Anita Racetrack which date from 1934 to the present; and a scrapbook and photographs about the William Parker Lyon Pony Express Museum in Arcadia, which flourished in the 1940s and early 1950s.