Henry Edwards Huntington was a successful railroad and realestate business man who wed his Uncle and business partner’s widow, Arabella Huntington in 1913. Together they gradually accumulated a massive collection of books, art and botanical specimens that has become today’s museum.

The numbers in the library are mind-bending; 7 million manuscripts, 430,000 rare books, 275,000 reference books, 875000 prints and 774,000 photographs. We only have the Huntington’s to thank for amassing this goldmine of information on American history, literature, art, and science, 40% of which pertains to the American West, a period in American history that never ceases to inspire fascination for the wild and gutsy tales that hail from it. It boasts rare treasures like first editions by famous authors WIllia,m Blake, Alexander Pope, Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, Shakespeare’s plays, as well as manuscripts and letters from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln.

Masterpieces of American and European art are spread throughout several rooms, still being expanded as you read this. Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Rogier van der Weyden’s Virgin and Child, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s French paintings, and Giambologna’s Nessus and Deianira are but a few of the celebrated artpieces among the 420 paintings, 370 works of sculpture, more than 2,500 decorative art objects, and 20,000 prints and drawings that the European collection consists of. The American art is no less impressive, with Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental Chimborazo, Mary Cassatt’s intimate Breakfast in Bed and Andy Warhol’s Small Crushed Campbell’s Soup Can.

Outside in the 120 acre grounds, the Botanical Gardens is split into an array of singular gardens, from the traditional Chinese with pavilions and teahouses, stone bridges and waterfalls, to the Desert Garden, a spiky terrain of alien-looking plants. There are few places in the world holding such a wealth of valuable knowledge within its walls, with something to intrigue every type of inquisitive mind.