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L.A. Stories: Community Spotlight

California State Library

The California State Library, comprising sections including California History, Information Services, Government Publications, and the Witkin Law Library in Sacramento and the Sutro Library in San Francisco, holds a wide variety of materials relating to the history of Los Angeles, including manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs and other visual resources, ephemera, vertical files, and more. To search our holdings, go to library.ca.gov and click Catalog; for contact information on our various public service desks, go to: https://www.library.ca.gov/contact-us/.

The California State Library seeks to make researchers and members of the general public aware of its wide variety of holdings concerning the Los Angeles region and to encourage their use. Though physically located in Northern California, the Library seeks to meet its statewide mission by serving users' needs via research and references services, interlibrary loan, and its ongoing digitization program.

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5. California State Library The California State Library, comprising sections including California History, Information Services, Government Publications, and the Witkin Law Library in Sacramento and the Sutro Library in San Francisco, holds a wide variety of materials relating to the history of Los Angeles, including manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs and other visual resources, ephemera, vertical files, and more. To search our holdings, go to library.ca.gov and click Catalog; for contact information on our various public service desks, go to: https://www.library.ca.gov/contact-us/.
  
  The California State Library seeks to make researchers and members of the general public aware of its wide variety of holdings concerning the Los Angeles region and to encourage their use. Though physically located in Northern California, the Library seeks to meet its statewide mission by serving users' needs via research and references services, interlibrary loan, and its ongoing digitization program.

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1. California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Cal Poly Pomona Special Collections and Archives collect, organize, preserve, and make available Cal Poly Pomona's rare books and archival collections. The collections center around themes relevant to the mission of the university and consist of rare and unique books and documents that are available for use by students, faculty, staff, alumni, and scholars. These historic materials support research and teaching at Cal Poly Pomona and promote our institution's heritage.
  
  https://www.cpp.edu/~library/special-collections/
2. Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library The Margaret Herrick Library collects a wide range of materials documenting film as both an art form and an industry. Its holdings include photographs, posters, books, periodicals, screenplays, oral histories, and extensive clippings files on people, films, and companies. The clippings files are organized under five headings: production, biography, general subject, festivals and awards, and Academy history. The general subject files contain clippings and photographs regarding aspects of Los Angeles such as homes, studios, motion picture theaters, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, Los Angeles as a location, educational and cultural institutions, theme parks, and landmarks; labor disputes and the formation of industry-related unions and guilds are also extensively documented in the general subject files. The Academy history files provide coverage of that very Los Angeles-based activity the Academy Awards. The library's Special Collections contain materials relating to the careers of numerous directors, producers, actors, and other craftspeople and their filmmaking work in Los Angeles. Dating from the early 1900s to the present, the materials in Special Collections include scripts in various drafts, personal and business correspondence, production memoranda, sketches, clippings, music scores, recordings, scrapbooks, artifacts, and photographs.
  
  https://www.oscars.org/library
3. South Pasadena Public Library Local History Collection The South Pasadena Public Library (SPPL) was founded on September 10, 1895 and is governed by the City Council-appointed Board of Trustees.
  
  The Local History Collection at SPPL collects and preserves our community's memory for current and future generations. The collection consists of a variety of materials relating to many aspects of South Pasadena history. Some major categories include: Historic Photographs, South Pasadena Newspapers and Quarterly, Local Yearbooks, City Records and Directories, Biographical Files, Home Research, Obituaries, City Landmarks, and early Library History.
  
  https://www.southpasadenaca.gov/library/
4. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries Founded in 1952, the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries in Los Angeles is the oldest continuously-operating LGBTQ organization in the United States and the largest archive in the world dedicated to collecting and preserving LGBTQ materials. Our collection comprises over 33,000 volumes of books and monographs; over 13,000 titles of LGBTQ periodicals; 700 manuscript and photograph collections; 15,000 items of audiovisual and moving image materials; and over 100,000 items of other materials, including posters, banners, textiles and ephemera. Collected for over 60 years by ONE Incorporated and historian Jim Kepner, ONE's materials span over a century and are international in scope. In 2010, the independent ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives became a part of the University of Southern California Libraries, which provides operational support to ONE for preserving and improving access to its collections. The USC Libraries actively support the discovery, creation, and preservation of knowledge with collections and services that encourage the academic endeavors of faculty, students, and staff. Library collections include more than 4 million volumes, 5.8 million microforms, 3.1 million visual materials, 98,700 serial titles, and 48,500 linear feet of manuscripts and archives.
  
  http://one.usc.edu/
5. Tom & Ethel Bradley Center The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center (formerly known as the Institute for Arts & Media) archives contain over one million images from Los Angeles based freelance and independent photographers between the 1930s to the present. Approximately 80% of the collection is comprised of African American photographers in and near Los Angeles. The Bradley Center is the only repository for photographs before 1993 from the Los Angeles Sentinel. Oral histories, manuscripts, and other ephemeral materials support the photographic collection. Additionally, the archives contain over six dozen oral histories from African American photographers, Civil Rights leaders and organizers, individuals involved with the history of Los Angeles, Journalism, Mexicans in Exile, and the United Farmworkers. Audio and video comprise the collection along with the personal papers of many individuals and organizations. The manuscript collections contains the papers of many Los Angeles civic leaders, the AFL-CIO, AFT, CA Federation of Teachers, Community Relations Committee of the Jewish-Federation Council of L.A., CPPA, League of Women Voters of L.A., and the United Way of L.A. Other collections include the archives of Journalist Michael Emery and the United Farmworkers Organization. The archives represent one of the largest collections of African American photographers west of the Mississippi and the most extensive collection in Southern California. Represented in the African American collection is the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders as well as local churches, politicians, musicians (many from the jazz era), singers, entertainers, athletes and social organizations. Coverage includes Dr. King, Tom Bradley, Sam Yorty, Rev. H.H. Brookins, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Earl Warren, Louis Armstrong, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Muhammad Ali, Errol Garner, Dinah Washington, James Baldwin, and many other luminaries. There is documentation of political campaigns, voter registrations and thousands of images of daily life and public occasions such as marches and protests, celebrations and parades. Photographers include Harry Adams, Charles Williams, Guy Crowder, Jack Davis, James Jeffrey, Roland Charles, Maxie Floyd, Calvin Hicks, Black Photographers of California, Bob Douglas, and Gordon "Specs" Powell. Outside of Los Angeles is coverage of the wars in El Salvador and Honduras, the Afro-Columbian community Palenque de San Basilio near Cartagena, Cuba, the Masai and the Maya refugee camps in Mexico. There is extensive documentation of the United Farmworkers organization and César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Gibert Padilla, Luis Valdez and other leaders of the union and its members. The Bradley Center's Border Studies Collection contains oral histories, video, and photographs documenting border issues and economic violence in Mexico. Also included in the archives are images of the San Fernando Valley including high school and college events. Additionally, IAM houses the Plaza Methodist Church (Los Angeles United Methodist Museum of Social Justice) archives of the beginnings of the church, documenting early Los Angeles and the immigrant communities between the 1890s to the 1960s. Photographers include Richard Cross, Emmon Clarke, Herb Carleton, and Julián Cardona.
  
  http://www.csun.edu/bradley-center
6. University of California Riverside Special Collections & University Archives
7. Caltech Archives and Special Collections The California Institute of Technology Archives and Special Collections, founded in 1968, has a mission of facilitating understanding of Caltech's role in the history of science and technology. Our collections include the papers of Caltech researchers; photographs, film, audio, video, websites, and publications documenting Caltech's history; scientific instruments characteristic of research at Caltech; and rare books anchored by the Rocco Collection of early modern physics and astronomy. We have been collecting oral histories of Caltech faculty and other affiliates since 1979, and have published approximately 200 transcripts on the web. Caltech has also made publicly available on the web the papers of astrophysicist George Ellery Hale, founder of Mount Wilson Observatory; aeronautical engineer and pioneer of human-powered flight Paul MacCready; and Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist and molecular biologist Donald Glaser.
  
  https://archives.caltech.edu/
8. Palos Verdes Library District, Local History Center The Local History Center of the Palos Verdes Library District focuses on the social and cultural history of the Palos Verdes Peninsula from the early 1900s to the present. This fairly extensive collection includes rare books, photographs, maps, blueprints, loose-leaf materials, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, telephone books, and oral history interviews- all relating to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
  
  http://www.pvld.org
9. UCLA Library Special Collections UCLA Library Special Collections is the largest of the special collections units administered by the university and encompasses the following divisions: Rare Books; Manuscripts, Prints, Photographs, and Maps; Oral History; and University Archives. It acquires, organizes, preserves, and provides access to rare and unique materials in the humanities and social sciences. The holdings include three hundred thousand rare books, forty-two thousand linear feet of manuscript and archival collections, and four million photographic negatives and prints. In addition, the department's nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections contain a variety of artifacts, audio recordings, videos, printed ephemera, oral history transcripts, phonograph records, postcards, and posters. The department acquires principally materials relating to the arts; California; area studies; ethnic studies; the history of printing, including atlases and early Italian books; and literature, including children's books. Some of the department's areas of specialization are Hebraica and Judaica; the history of philosophy; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies; natural resources; photography; travel and exploration; and women. The more than twenty-four hundred collections in the Department of Special Collections are managed by the divisions of. Each division's holdings are selected or created to complement those of the other divisions. Researchers are welcome to discuss holdings at greater length with the staff.
  
  https://www.library.ucla.edu/location/library-special-collections
10. Center for the Study of Political Graphics The Center for the Study of Political Graphics is an educational and research archive that collects, preserves, documents, and exhibits domestic and international poster art. The Center's domestic and international collection of more than 90,000 political posters dates from the early 20th century to the present, and includes the largest collection of post World War II political posters in the United States. The posters are produced in a variety of artistic mediums- offset, silk screen, lithography, woodblock, linocut, stencil, photocopy, and computer-generated prints. The collection is focused on international, domestic, and Los Angeles-specific human rights issues, with an emphasis on progressive movements in the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Poster topics include the women's movement, racism, peace, apartheid, labor, liberation theology, AIDS, gay and lesbian rights, immigrants' rights, children's rights, and ecology. Between one and two thousand posters are acquired annually, primarily through donation. Approximately half of these are given by collectors in Los Angeles and reflect the diverse political interests of the donors. This has yielded a collection that, in part, documents important but often underrepresented aspects of local history and life in the Los Angeles area. The collection contains approximately three thousand human rights and protest posters produced in Los Angeles from 1965 to the present. The earliest of these came out of the Watts Uprising of 1965, while the more recent posters not only reflect prevailing concerns but commemorate older events, such as the U.S. government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Altogether, the posters illustrate the commitment of many Los Angeles-based artists, organizations, and individuals to a variety of social and political issues over the last five decades.
  
  http://www.politicalgraphics.org/
11. The Claremont Colleges, Special Collections
12. All the Saints of the City of the Angels An historical and poetic road trip through the cultural heritage of Los Angeles, via its hundred streets named for saints. Contending that the history of a place resides in its names, "All the Saints" seeks the points of convergence between the stories of the saints and the histories of the streets which bear their names. The results are rendered in painting and story. Thus far, over 100 paintings and dozens of essays have been collected into a major coffee table book (published by Heyday Books, 2008) and an exhibition at the Autry Museum (through September 2008); as well as a website, public installations, and adssorted merchandise.
  
  http://www.allthesaints.com
13. Glendale Library, Arts & Culture The Glendale History Room at the Downtown Central Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library contains monographs about the City of Glendale and its history, clippings from newspapers published in the Glendale area, historical photographs, and ephemera related to community events and organizations. Materials about neighboring cities and Los Angeles County-adjacent counties. Materials written by local authors part of the collection. In addition to scrapbooks assembled by local organizations and individuals, the archival holdings include the personal papers of Carroll "Mr. Glendale" Parcher (1903-1992), who was at various times the editor of the Glendale News-Press, a member of the city council, and the city's mayor; and the papers of Dora Verdugo (1882-1984), who was the great-granddaughter of Jose Verdugo, the original recipient in 1784 of the Spanish land grant for the property on which the City of Glendale is located.
  
  https://www.eglendalelac.org/
14. Burbank Public Library: Burbank in Focus
15. Lanterman House The Lanterman House Archives preserves and makes available a wide range of materials pertaining to the history of the Crescenta-Cañada Valley for the historical and cultural education of the City of La Cañada Flintridge, the Greater Los Angeles Area, and the State of California. Major collections include the Lanterman Family Papers, the Frank D. Lanterman Sheet Music Collection, and the Local History Collection of the Crescenta-Cañada Valley and La Cañada Flintridge. The Archives also house the political papers of Frank D. Lanterman, whose 28-year career as a California State Assemblyman yielded significant advances for the rights of the developmentally disabled as well as water rights for unincorporated areas. The Lanterman House Archive's series of 45 oral histories bring the area to life through interviews with residents and local historians on topics ranging from education, to water rights, to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Lanterman House, owned by Dr. Roy and Emily Lanterman, was designed by architect Arthur Haley in 1915 and features a U-shaped Mexican Colonial hacienda design. The house's interior, which is completely restored and decorated with English Arts and Crafts design elements, includes its original furnishings. Now a museum, the Lanterman House is open to visitors for tours.
  
  https://www.lantermanhouse.org/
16. California State Library The California State Library, comprising sections including California History, Information Services, Government Publications, and the Witkin Law Library in Sacramento and the Sutro Library in San Francisco, holds a wide variety of materials relating to the history of Los Angeles, including manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs and other visual resources, ephemera, vertical files, and more. To search our holdings, go to library.ca.gov and click Catalog; for contact information on our various public service desks, go to: https://www.library.ca.gov/contact-us/.
  
  The California State Library seeks to make researchers and members of the general public aware of its wide variety of holdings concerning the Los Angeles region and to encourage their use. Though physically located in Northern California, the Library seeks to meet its statewide mission by serving users' needs via research and references services, interlibrary loan, and its ongoing digitization program.
17. Los Angeles Public Library The Los Angeles Public Library's Photograph Collections comprise a number of major collections including: The Security Pacific National Bank Collection, donated to LAPL in 1981, consisting of over 150,000 photographs documenting the growth of Los Angeles and its many neighborhoods. The SPNB Collection also contains images from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce depicting business, industry, sports and agriculture in Los Angeles during its greatest growth spurt, 1920-1939. The Shades of L.A. archive contains images representing the full range of contemporary and historic ethnic and cultural diversity in the greater Los Angeles region. Copied from family albums in a project sponsored by Photo Friends, the photographs show daily life, work, social organizations, personal and holiday celebrations, and migration and immigration activities. Also archived are approximately twelve oral histories that were collected during the project and available through the LAPL website. http://www.lapl.org/catalog/shades/ The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Photograph Collection consists of the newspaper's morgue of 2.2 million photographs doumenting Southern California, the nation, and the world in the years from the 1920s to 1989. The Valley Times newspaper morgue spans from 1946-1972 and focuses on the post-war growth of the San Fernando Valley. The LAPL Photo Collection also has smaller collections of specific photographers including Ansel Adams, Herman Schultheis, Howard Kelly, Gary Leonard, Carol Westwood, C.C. Pierce, William Reagh, and Ralph Morris.
  
  https://tessa.lapl.org/photocol
18. Visual Communications Based in the Little Tokyo area of Downtown Los Angeles, VC was founded in 1970 by a group of pioneering independent filmmakers to record, collect, and preserve a visual record of Asian Pacific American cultural heritage. VC originally worked as a film collective, concentrating on honestly portraying accurate images of Asian Americans and meticulously capturing pivotal social movements. VC produced groundbreaking works about the Asian American experience, including: CHINATOWN 2-STEP, a documentary on the suburbanization of Chinese American community in Los Angeles and the role of the Chinatown Drum and Bugle Corps; MANONG, a film on the first generation Filipino American immigrants; and WATARIDORI, a documentary on early Japanese American immigrant pioneers. VC published three books, In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian Pacific America, Little Tokyo: One Hundred Years in Pictures, and Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts. Productions were used for education and activism that addressed setting up ethnic studies programs on local campuses, city redevelopment issues, the redress campaign for Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. VC's own past in all media, narrative films, documentaries and educational projects are intertwined with the Asian Pacific American movements of the 1970s, and in itself represents a rich resource for researchers of the Asian Pacific American movements. The Archives' purpose is to document the history of the organization by organizing, preserving, and creating access to a variety of media art and primary materials recording impactful political moments and depicting the Asian Pacific American heritage for staff use, as well as by scholars who are interested in Visual Communications' role in the Asian American communities and history. The holdings include over 300,000 photographic images, 1,500 titles in the Media Resource Library, 100 films and videos produced by Visual Communications, and over 1,000 hours of oral histories of pan-Asian Pacific American content. As a valuable resource of Asian media art representations, The Archives is open to a wide variety of users, and we encourage the public, artists, filmmakers, students, faculty and others to pursue an intercultural understanding of the Asian American heritage. VC's vision for the archives is to accurately reflect and represent the diversity of the American populace and to cement Asian Pacific American experiences in the historical record through the preservation, access, and dissemination of our materials, which provide historical context and insight of Asian Pacific American influence not only for Asian Pacific Americans, but also for all Americans.
  
  https://vcmedia.org/
19. Santa Barbara Historical Museum Completed in 1964, the Santa Barbara Historical Museum has emerged as an essential landmark for the preservation and celebration of Santa Barbara's regional history.
  
  As one of the oldest cultural institutions in Santa Barbara, SBHM is home to the vast archival collection of documents and artifacts within our Gledhill Library and collections vault. Our rotating exhibits in the Sala Gallery feature dynamic elements of Santa Barbara's local traditions, art, and historical events, while our permanent gallery "The Story of Santa Barbara" traces the development of Santa Barbara's history from the Chumash to the mid 20th century.
20. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
22. California State University, Los Angeles Special Collections & Archives California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) Special Collections and Archives supports the discovery, learning and engagement goals of the University by identifying, acquiring, preserving, and providing access to unique and rare materials of enduring value in support of the academic mission of the University, the educational and research needs of the Cal State LA academic community, scholars, and the research community at large.
  
  Special Collections and Archives collects unpublished and published materials relating to Cal State LA, local, regional, and state history. Items may include but are not limited to unpublished works such as personal papers and manuscripts, institutional and university records, photographs, and ephemera. Published materials may include books, periodicals, newspapers, and posters.
  
  The Cal State LA Library, Special Collections and Archives unit documents the history and culture of communities in Los Angeles. Areas of focus include publications in Los Angeles history, literature, the arts, and public official papers, and ethnic communities.
  
  https://www.calstatela.edu/specialcollections
23. Pasadena Museum of History The Research Library and Archives has been collecting material relating to the history of Pasadena since 1924. The archives contains approximately 1 million historic images (including photos, negatives, postcards, stereographs) of Pasadena and surrounding areas. There are 45 cubic feet of maps and plans of the area, as well as a set of Sanborm fire insurance maps for Pasadena. There is a large collection of ephemera, scrapbooks, and photo albums relating to the history of the city. There are about 250 special collections, including the Sylvanus Marston set of architectural drawings; the Tournament of Roses Collection; the Giddings-Hollingsworth Family Collection; the Fenyes-Curtin-Paloheimo Papers; the Black History Collection; the Hugh Anderson/Model Grocery Company Collection. There are more than 1,000 books and 50 linear feet of periodicals on the history of the city and general Southern California area, including a nearly complete run of Pasadena city directories from 1895-1976.
  
  http://www.pasadenahistory.org/research
24. Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives Pepperdine University's Special Collections and University Archives maintains several collections of materials related to the history of Los Angeles. The Malibu Historical Collection includes a full run of the Malibu Times newspaper (1946-present), a full run of the the Malibu Surfside News newspaper (1973-present), the John Mazza Collection of Historic Surfboards, historic books related to Malibu and its residents, audio recordings of lectures on Malibu history, and records of the Malibu Water Company, the Rindge Dam, and the Malibu Stage Company. The James Hahn Collection (1990-2005) includes materials from Hahn's years as mayor of Los Angeles and as Los Angeles City Attorney. The Elinor Oswald Collection of Los Angeles Tourism Ephemera includes brochures, pamphlets, and newspaper clippings related to museums, art galleries, and artists in the Los Angeles area. The William S. Banowsky Papers and the M. Norvel Young Papers include materials related to various civic and political events in the Los Angeles area that occurred during their tenures as Pepperdine presidents. The Pepperdine University Archives includes photographs, audio and video, publications, and institutional records that document the history of the institution from its founding in 1937 in South Central Los Angeles, to its move to Malibu in 1972, to the present time.
  
  https://library.pepperdine.edu/collections/special-collections/
25. Wilmington Historical Society
26. Santa Monica Public Library The Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives contain historical photographs, postcards, and slides documenting the city's changing landscape and architecture as well as the commercial enterprises that shaped the development of the City of Santa Monica. The Archives include surrounding areas such as Pacific Palisades, Venice and Malibu among others. As early as 1875, Santa Monica's beaches attracted visitors from other areas, making tourism and transportation key local industries. The Archives include many images of resort hotels, bathhouses, amusement piers, the Long Wharf (intended Port of Los Angeles), Southern Pacific Railroad, and Douglas Aircraft, along with bearchgoers, shopkeepers, classes of schoolchildren, founding families, Spanish land grant holders, and other historically significant people. All of the Archives' images are available in digitized format on the web from the Library's digital collection site, Imagine Santa Monica, http://digital.smpl.org. The Library has the Santa Monica Outlook newspaper (1875- 1998) available on microfilm at the Main Library. Early years of the Outlook (1875-1920) are also available from the Imagine Santa Monica site. The Library's staff has selectively indexed and annotated articles published in the newspaper between 1950 and 1998. Since the demise of the Outlook, the Library's staff has indexed the local information published in the weekly "Our Times" section of the Los Angeles Times and is currently indexing the Santa Monica Mirror. Both are also available on microfilm. The newspaper indexes are available online from Imagine Santa Monica, http://digital.smpl.org.
27. Workman & Temple Family Homestead Museum
28. Seaver Center for Western History Research, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County The Seaver Center for Western History Research collects, preserves, and makes available to the general public and to scholars historic records pertaining to the history and the exploration of the trans-Mississippi American West, with particular emphasis on Southern California and Los Angeles. Its historic records holdings include (but are not limited to) manuscript materials, books, serials, trade catalogs, pamphlets, broadsides, maps, posters, prints, photographs, and a historic site file listing information on some eight hundred fifty buildings in Southern California. The Seaver Center also acquires research materials that support History Division exhibits and research by History Division curators.
  
  https://nhm.org/research-collections/departments/history/seaver-center
29. University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections The University of Southern California (USC) University Archives is the repository for the records of enduring value officially made or received by the University of Southern California, and for other materials of historical value related to the functions of the University. The University Archives includes material documenting the history and growth of the University of Southern California.
  
  https://libraries.usc.edu/locations/special-collections
30. Self Help Graphics & Art Self Help Graphics & Art fosters the creation and advancement of new art works by Chicana/o and Latinx artists through experimental and innovative printmaking techniques and other visual art forms. We are an organization rooted in community; and since 1973, have been at the intersection of arts and social justice, providing a home that fosters the creativity and development of local artists. We establish international collaborations and partnerships nation-wide and create world-wide cultural exchanges.
  
  http://www.selfhelpgraphics.com

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Stereograph depicting an apiary at Sierra Madre Villa hotel, San Gabriel, ca. 1887. Though an 1871 surveyor general’s report deemed LA County the Southland’s greatest honey producer, the industry only truly took off after an 1876 drought killed many cattle herds. Many saw honeybees as a get-rich-quick scheme, and beekeeping became so popular that by 1880, in his pamphlet, “Homes in Los Angeles County,” W. McPherson would claim that there were “fully one hundred thousand colonies in Los Angeles County today.” Though the City of Los Angeles banned beekeeping within city limits in 1879, arguing that bees attacked fruit and destroyed crops (an argument soon to be debunked), in the 1870s and 1880s, beekeeping thrived especially in the Sierra Madre foothills, as seen in this stereograph. And, indeed, as late as 1911, beekeeping was still going strong in Los Angeles (though by that point bees were more typically deployed to gather nectar from orange blossoms than from white sage).
Stereograph by Henry T. Payne depicting elevated view of farmhouse and buildings at Lincoln's Bee Ranch in Nicholson Canyon, Los Angeles County. In today’s Los Angeles, backyard beekeeping is all the rage, spurred by an increasing interest in local food and by the City itself, which overturned a late-19th-century ban to legalize urban beekeeping in 2015. But while many associate Los Angeles with agriculture and even viniculture, fewer likely think of the early California industry of “bee ranching” or of the region’s beekeeping past. First imported to California in 1853 by Christopher A. Shelton, introduced to the Southland in 1854 by O. W. Childs, and popularized by John Stewart Harbison, the European Honeybee thrived in Los Angeles’ mild climate, feeding on nectar from bountiful white sage. Hives became common in the Los Angeles Basin, often at sites such as Lincoln’s Bee Ranch in Nicholsons Canyon, as depicted in this photo.