The California Historical Society collects materials of enduring historical and cultural value in support of its mission to inspire and empower Californians to make the past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives. In our North Baker Research Library, we hold some fifty thousand books and pamphlets, four thousand manuscript collections, half a million photographs, as well as ephemera,…

The archaeological site material in the museum’s collections dates from approximately 8,000 thousand years ago to the early 1800s. This material includes artifacts from the  indigenous people known as the Tongva who were living on Catalina Island - which they called Pimu - when the Spanish arrived in 1542. Also in the collections are approximately two thousand items dating from the 1880s to the…

The Downey Historical Society is located at the Downey History Center in Apollo Park. For more than thirty years, the society's all-volunteer staff has been gathering and preserving records and artifacts from and about the southeastern part of Los Angeles County. The society's collection includes original photographs from 1870 to the present (copy negatives, duplicate prints, or 35-mm slides are…