Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
San Francisco and California
Image not available
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Manuscripts
The collection consists of the personal and business papers of Henry E. Huntington. There is material related to the Huntington, Holladay (Henry E. Huntington's sister Caroline married Edmund Burke Holladay), and Metcalf families, but most of the collection deals with Huntington's business interests in Southern California, railways, real estate, and industry. There is a series about Henry E. Huntington and his family that includes biographical information, newspaper clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, ephemera, and physical objects. There is material related to the Huntington Land and Improvement Company, Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, and the Pacific Electric Railway Company as well as other businesses in Los Angeles County, Orange County, and San Gabriel Valley, California. This material includes business records, account books, annual reports, correspondence, maps, tracts, balance sheets, and others. There is also material related to the founding of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens including auction catalogs, invoices, receipts, and bills for art and rare books, and information regarding a lawsuit about Huntington's estate tax after his death, and the passing of Proposition 15, in 1930, which exempted The Huntington from paying California property tax. There is also material related to Collis P. Huntington and his business interests and Arabella Huntington. The largest series contains over 22,000 pieces of personal and business correspondence spanning approximately 1790 to 1950. The physical objects include Henry E. Huntington's lunch box, razors, traveling trunk, and other items.
mssHEH
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Visual Materials
A collection of approximately 7,000 cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs, almost entirely portraits of ordinary people in the American West, photographed between approximately 1860 and 1910. The photographs represent the work of thousands of commercial photographers operating in every state west of the Mississippi, plus Wisconsin, which the collector considered a western state given its frontier role in the migration of photographers from the East to West. The collection includes 23 states and territories, including Hawaii, and a few portraits from British Columbia and Western Canada. There are a relatively small number of photographs from Alaska (1) and Arizona (6), not due to scarcity, but because those parts of the collection were previously dispersed. Portraits taken in California make up about half of the collection, representing established photographers in big cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as lesser-known photographers in sparsely populated mountain towns. The people of the frontier and post-frontier West posing in the portraits are mostly unidentified, though some images do have handwritten names and dates. The majority of people pictured are white, with a relatively small number of portraits of African American, Chinese, Latino, and Indigenous persons. Sitters are of all ages, seen in individual poses or in family groups, in various styles of clothing, hair, jewelry, props, and furniture. Images include soldiers, wedding portraits, mothers with babies, children, frontiersmen, workers with tools, dogs, and occasional outdoor images of buildings or people. This collection was amassed over 35 years and became the primary source material for Mautz's seminal reference work Biographies of Western Photographers (1997). The thousands of imprints, some elaborately illustrated, include the names of several female photographers, such as: Fannie Hoyt, Salt Lake City, Utah; Mrs. E. W. (Eliza) Withington, Ione City, California; and Mrs. C. Klostermann, Eureka, California.
photCL 581
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Visual Materials
This collection contains approximately 1,000 printed 19th and early 20th century entertainment broadsides, playbills, and related advertisements, and forms a subset within the Jay T. Last Collection of Entertainment. These items advertise theatrical performances including plays, variety entertainment such as minstrel, burlesque, and vaudeville shows, and optical displays such as dioramas, living statues, and tableaus. Over 250 theaters primarily from the Northeastern United States are represented in the collection, though there are also materials from theaters in the Midwestern, Southern, and Western United States, and approximately 26 items from Canada, Ireland, England, and Scotland. The materials range in size from approximately 9 1/2 x 6 inches to 42 1/2 x 14 inches and consist of single-sheet unfolded advertisements for theatrical productions that were intended to be distributed by hand, posted on walls, fences, or in windows, or sold to playgoers entering the theater. Among the names given to these types of advertisements, according to their size and mode of distribution, are broadsides, dodgers, handbills, hangers, playbills, posters, and show bills.
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