San Marino - Henry E Huntington Library and Art Gallery

From Los Angeles the way to this museum complex (1151 Oxford Road, San Marino) is via the Pasadena Freeway (exit for Altadena/Arroyo), or by taking bus no. 432, but this service is not very frequent.

As unusual as the museum itself is its history. Like so many others, Collis Huntington, a small shopkeeper in Oneonta in New York State, left the town of his birth in 1849 to go in search of gold in distant California.

However, it was not gold which made him a very rich man, but the fact that he went into railway construction at the right time. A large part of his fortune went directly to his nephew Henry, who also inherited the rest through marriage - he married Arabella, his uncle's widow. With this money Henry bought a 500 acre/200 hectare ranch in San Marino - today it is a township of elegant villas with about 13,000 inhabitants - and in the years 1909 to 1911 he built his palace-like villa with its huge garden. While Arabella concerned herself mainly with the acquisition of European, especially English, works of art, Henry devoted himself completely to the library, which today boasts one of the most important manuscript collections of English and American history in the world, and to laying out the garden. Henry Huntington was no idler; he founded the Pacific Electric Railway Co., which ran the whole tramway network in Los Angeles and the county and as the result of clever purchases he became the biggest landowner in southern California. By the time of his death in 1929 he had considerably increased the fortune he had inherited.

In 1919 he donated the whole of his land and estates in San Marino to the library, gallery and garden. At the same time he founded an ancillary research institute with an initial capital of 10.5 million dollars.