The Nevada County Historical Archive is a digital repository of original records, documents, maps, photographs, books, and other materials related to the history of Nevada County. These treasures are housed in the Searls Historical Library and the Doris Foley Library for Historical Research, both in Nevada City, the seat of Nevada County, California. The archive is a collaboration between the Searls Library, part of the Nevada County Historical Society, and the Foley Library, part of the Nevada County Library system. Its purpose is to digitally preserve and celebrate Nevada County's nearly two-century history by providing public access to this immense and amazing wealth of resources.

In August 2024, we embarked on an ambitious project to digitize everything at the Searls Historical Library. We have now expanded our efforts to help all our local museums and libraries to scan and digitize our precious history.

While we have scanned an amazing 120,000+ pages of materials, we need to purchase equipment to tackle over 8,000 photo negatives. Most of these are large format and don't fit a regular 35mm negative scanner. And we want to start digitizing over 10,000 maps, but need an expensive large format scanner for that.

You can see what we have been able to do with very little budget and an all-volunteer team. Would you be able to help to fund our next steps?

The Searls Historical Library is the archive of the Nevada County Historical Society. The original building was donated to the Society by the descendants of one of the earliest attorneys in the area, Niles Searls. Established in 1973, the Searls Library has become one of the premier libraries of materials on the area’s history, people and mines which contributed to the development of this county. In 2014, the library moved to it's current location, the old National Guard Armory building, built in 1953.

Researchers can come look at over 30,000 historical photographs, nearly 3,000 printed books on early California and Gold Rush history, and several thousand maps of the area. The Searls Library also contains innumerable original documents, including ledgers, school yearbooks, diaries, colorful pamphlets, old county records, and old family letters. The Searls family of attorneys also left their early legal records and court cases from the 1850s-1880s, which are the only copies in existence.

The Doris Foley Library is a non-circulating branch of the Nevada County Community Library system. It is housed in a Romanesque Revival architectural style Carnegie library building completed in 1907. Construction costs were approximately $10,000. It was originally the Nevada City Library and today the building is still owned by the city. The library is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Library contains research materials regarding Nevada County history. All materials are for in-Library use only; though many of the books may be checked out at other branches. The Library is dedicated to acquiring and preserving materials including, but not limited to books, manuscripts, photographs, letters, diaries, business records, official records, reports, minutes, maps, and personal papers relating to Nevada County.

Doris Foley Library Digital Collection
The Digital Collection is a searchable online collection of digitized photographs, posters, and other materials held at the Doris Foley Library for Historical Research.

This site was architected and developed by Dom Lindars, membership & IT director at the Historical Society, award-winning author, local historian and retired software engineer. The archive structure, layout and search features were conceived with the support of Dakota Stroh, Laura Pappani, and Bill Wetherall Jr. Dom Lindars also oversees the operational running of the site, hosted and paid for by the Historical Society, including the many months taken to OCR all the digital content for web search and display. If you are interested in more technical details about the site and infrastructure, please email us at [email protected].