Ferndale Museum

A local history museum covering Ferndale and the surrounding Eel River valley from the arrival of European settlers in the 1850s through the dairy farming boom of the late nineteenth century. The collection includes Victorian-era farm equipment, photographs, and domestic objects that give a good sense of what daily life in an isolated coastal farming community looked like before the highway arrived.

The active seismograph is the museum's most unusual attraction — a working mechanical instrument that has been recording regional earthquakes since 1933. The paper drum rotates slowly, and you can watch the needle trace its record in real time. The museum is small and can be seen in 30 to 45 minutes. It is a good orientation stop before walking the main street.

things to do museum
A story
The museum houses one of the few remaining active Bosch-Omori seismographs in California, a mechanical earthquake-recording device of a type mostly replaced by digital instruments decades ago. It was installed in 1933 and has been running continuously since, producing a paper record of every earthquake in the region for nearly a century. The 1992 Cape Mendocino earthquake — the largest earthquake to hit the contiguous United States in forty years — is recorded on the drum.