Kern County Museum and Pioneer Village: The Okie Story in Three Dimensions

The Kern County Museum in Bakersfield has assembled more than fifty original historic structures on sixteen acres, creating a kind of outdoor archive of the physical world that the Dust Bowl migration produced and inhabited. The exact founding date of the Pioneer Village is not confirmed in the sources available here, but the collection's scope, documented in the museum's own published materials, is unusual for a regional institution.

What makes it unusual is specificity. The collection documents the arrival and settlement of Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas with a granularity that most regional museums apply to more celebrated populations. The structures on the grounds include examples of the temporary housing that farmworker families occupied in Kern County labor camps in the nineteen thirties. Not reconstructions. Original structures.

The demographic transformation those migrants produced is still the defining fact of Kern County's political and cultural character. The evangelical churches, the working-class conservatism, the musical tradition that produced Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and the specific flavor of California populism that has made Kern one of the most reliably Republican counties in a reliably Democratic state, all of it traces back to the nineteen thirties migration. The Kern County Museum is the place in the valley where that transformation has been most deliberately preserved as a physical record.

Steinbeck documented the camps in prose. Dorothea Lange documented them in photographs. The Kern County Museum preserved the actual buildings. Of the three forms of documentation, the buildings are the least famous and the most direct.