The following excerpt is from an extensive article written by Ginger McGuire, and published in the Chico News & Review. For the last 15 years, Butte County Clerk-Recorder Candace Grubbs has tried to get the county to establish a hall of records for its thousands of historic documents. They are currently stored in several sites — most lacking climate controls — and are largely inaccessible to the public. Read all about it.
If you were a researcher looking into early Butte County history, at some point you’d probably end up in an anonymous-looking warehouse off
Grand Avenue in Oroville.
At first glance, it doesn’t look like a place where historical records would be kept. Most noticeable, in fact, are the voting booths stored here, and the hundreds of boxes of miscellaneous paperwork.
But it’s also the principal storehouse for historic county records, and as such a veritable candy story for historians, one filled with old, tattered ledgers and books—all handwritten documents detailing Butte County history dating back 150 years or more, to the mid-19th century.
Massive registrar-of-voters ledgers; files full of chattel mortgages and deeds; aged Oroville Mercury, Chico Enterprise and Chico Record newspapers; maps; naturalization records, and birth records are among the stored items, all of them valuable cultural resources in one of the oldest counties in California.
Indeed, official county documents extend to 1850, the year California became a state, when a much larger Butte County extended to include territory that is now part of Plumas and Tehama counties.
