“The new San Francisco will be grander and more beautiful,” reads the small description on a map of the City from 1906. Illustrated streets in the western portion are obscured by hand-drawn red flames and labeled “burned district” to show the extent of damage sustained after the 7.9-magnitude earthquake earlier that year. The map is one of more than 600,000 items long held by the California Historical Society, which was established in 1871 and, unlike its peers in some states, did not receive regular state funding. In January, the financially struggling nonprofit announced plans to dissolve and to transfer its entire collection to Stanford. Among the items, which will remain accessible to the public, are the archives of the California Flower Market, founded by Japanese American flower merchants in 1912, and chronicles of the Gold Rush. All told, the collection is a “relatively untapped resource for historical research, for teaching, and for understanding the history of California and the western region,” said university librarian Michael Keller. Stanford Libraries’ holdings are already 15 million strong, but there’s always space to become grander and more beautiful.
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
