In 1985, the first Peoples Temple collection was donated to the California Historical Society (CHS). Known as “Peoples Temple Records,” it comprised more than 100 cartons, representing the most comprehensive history of Peoples, from its origins in Indiana in the 1950s, through its moves to Redwood Valley, San Francisco and Guyana. The collection also included numerous legal and other documents created after 1978, as a court-appointed receiver worked for five years to dissolve the church, liquidate its assets and settle all lawsuits. Upon its dissolution, the California court declared CHS the official repository for records created by Peoples Temple.
CHS housed the collection for almost 40 years, receiving hundreds of visitors – ranging from religious studies scholars to documentarians to relatives and friends of the Temple – and assisting in their efforts to bring understanding to the Temple and its end in Jonestown.
In 2024, financial difficulties caused CHS to close its doors and to start the process of transferring the entire collection – tens of thousands of photographs, manuscripts, and rare books – to its new home at Stanford University Libraries.
Now called the California Historical Society Collection at Stanford, the collection is cared for by a team of curators, conservators, digitization specialists, and archivists – including two former CHS staff. While the transfer of such a massive archive is a process scheduled to take at least three years, a number of Peoples Temple collections, always in high demand from researchers and film makers, have already been made available to researchers and plans for additional materials to be digitized and accessible online are underway. Stanford will continue to seek out and collect original materials related to the history of the Temple. If you have any questions about possible donations, please reach out to Frances Kaplan at chscollection@stanford.edu.
For many of you who visited the California Historical Society over the past decades and were so integral in providing information about the collection and adding to it, we thank you for your support and trust and we hope very much to see you in our new home at Stanford University’s beautiful Green Library. The Special Collections Reading Room is open five days a week, from 9 to 5 and open to all.
To view the CHS Collections available, including several Peoples Temple collections, California Historical Society at Stanford
To learn more about visiting the Special Collections at Stanford, see https://library.stanford.edu/libraries/special-collections
(Frances Kaplan is the Archivist/Librarian for the California Historical Society Collections at Stanford University Libraries. A listing of articles about the Temple collection during its years at the California Historical Society appears here. She may be reached at fwkaplan@stanford.edu.)