The Crocker Art Museum

The building on O Street that houses the Crocker Art Museum was the private mansion of Edwin Bryant Crocker, a Sacramento lawyer and judge who had served as general counsel to the Central Pacific Railroad during its construction across the Sierra Nevada in the eighteen-sixties. E.B.'s brother Charles Crocker was one of the Big Four who owned and operated the Central Pacific. The family fortune came from the railroad.

The Central Pacific was built, in its Sierra crossing, primarily by Chinese labor. Historians have estimated that as many as ten thousand Chinese men worked on the railroad at peak construction, drilling tunnels by hand through granite, handling black powder and nitroglycerin in conditions that killed hundreds of them. The railroad company did not keep systematic records of Chinese worker deaths. The names of most of those workers are not known.

E.B. Crocker had attached a purpose-built gallery wing to the mansion in the early eighteen-seventies. He died in eighteen seventy-five, and it was his widow, Margaret Crocker, who in eighteen eighty-five donated the gallery and its collection to the city for public use. It was the first public art museum west of the Mississippi River. The collection is real and substantial, and the museum that grew from it continues to be one of the better regional art institutions in California.

The timing is worth noting. The Chinese Exclusion Act had passed in eighteen eighty-two. The same decade in which the Crocker family's gallery became the first public art museum west of the Mississippi, the labor force whose work had made the Crocker fortune possible was being excluded by federal law from the country that built the railroad.

The museum is worth visiting. The story of how it was funded is worth knowing before you go in.