Society of California Pioneers. All rights reserved.
© 2004 Society of California Pioneers. All rights reserved.
Selected digitized photographs available online.
Collection open for research.
Property rights reside with the Society of California Pioneers. For permission to publish or to reproduce, please contact the Registrar.
Please use the following citation format for all items. Refer to a standard citation style, such as MLA, ALA, or Turabian, when identifying the individual item: [Item]. [Item number]. Society of California Pioneers, San Francisco, California.
Gift of Florence V. Flinn, 1969
These 1,495 photographs were digitized and catalogued as part of a one-year project funded by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) from July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2004, to preserve and provide access to these unique, historically important images. The project entailed photographing each photograph to create 4x5" color transparencies that serve as both the archival form of the images and the source of the digital images. Supporting metadata accompanies each image. All photography, scanning and cataloguing were performed onsite by a professional museum photographer and Society staff. In addition to submitting these digital objects to the Online Archive of California (OAC), we intend to have them available on our
This collection represents the "desk" or "tourist" catalog of views for sale that had once belonged to the illustrious San Francisco stereopublishing firm of Lawrence & Houseworth. All of these samples were numbered and captioned so that prospective clients could readily select the photographs of greatest interest. They were available either as twin-imaged stereographs or singly as "album views" mounted on standard-size carte de visite cards.
The Lawrence & Houseworth albums contain photographic prints published in the 1860s that document the many aspects of gold, silver (Comstock Lode), and quicksilver mining; the building of the Sutro Tunnel; the growth of northern California industries; mining towns including Columbia, Volcano, Brown's Flat, French Corral, and Birchville; cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Stockton, and Sacramento; churches and schools; the development of transportation including covered wagons, shipping and the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad; railroad cars; portraits of Native Americans; and some of the state's natural wonders including the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite Valley, Lake Tahoe, and the Big Trees of Calaveras and Mariposa counties.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.