Daly City's old library sits near the city's first chapter

Daly City has one of those origin stories that starts with a crisis and turns into a neighborhood.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, John Daly opened his farmland to people who needed shelter. Houses from refugee camps were later moved south, streets were laid out, and the pressure for a separate city grew. Daly City incorporated in 1911 and took his name.

The History Guild Museum keeps that story close to the ground. It sits in the old John Daly Library, near the historic dairy farm area where refugees came after the disaster. The small library building began in 1920, then grew with an Art Deco front addition in 1938.

That makes the museum a living marker rather than a room of old objects. It sits near the place where emergency shelter, farmland, streetcars, libraries, and cityhood started to overlap.