Historical Marker · No. 791
Original Site of Bancroft Library
San Francisco, San Francisco County · California
Erected by California State Park Commission in cooperation with the Friends of the Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, and St. Luke's Hospital, 1964
The women in this library came in almost by accident. When Bancroft's interviewers went out in the 1870s to take down the memories of the Californio gentry, some sixty-two people in all, they often found the men away and recorded the women of the household instead: Eulalia Pérez at San Gabriel, who said she was 139; Juana Machado in San Diego; Apolinaria Lorenzana, once teacher and nurse at the mission there. Thirteen of the dictations are women's. They left for Berkeley with the rest in 1906.
What the plaque says
Original Site of Bancroft Library Here, from 1881-1906, stood the library of Hubert Howe Bancroft, who in 1860 began to collect the wealth of material which was to subsequently result in the writing of his monumental history of western North America. In 1905, the library was purchased by the University of California and removed the following year to its Berkeley campus. California Registered Historical Landmark No. 791 Plaque placed by the California State Park Commission in cooperation with the Friends of the Bancroft Library, the California Historical Society, and St. Luke's Hospital, November 24, 1964.
Where it stands
37.74758, -122.42038 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Muir Beach Overlook — 12 miA cliff edge on Highway 1, and the concrete dugouts where two-man crews watched the sea after Pearl Harbor.
- Muir Woods National Monument — 13 miA redwood canyon saved from a reservoir by a gift, and named for a man who had been there once.
- Earthquake Trail — 29 miA short loop along the San Andreas, where a broken fence shows how far Point Reyes moved in under a minute in 1906.
- Kule Loklo — 29 miA Coast Miwok village built in the 1970s to honour a people its builders were told had died out. They had not.