Long before the Crocker Art Museum became Sacramento's cultural anchor, its building held a bowling alley, a skating rink and a billiards room on the ground floor, with a natural history museum and library upstairs. Judge Edwin B. Crocker bought the O Street property in 1868 and had architect Seth Babson fit it out as an Italianate mansion with a gallery wing for his private art collection.

Edwin's brother was Charles Crocker, railroad baron and one of the Central Pacific's 'Big Four'. When Edwin's widow, Margaret, gave the gallery and collection to the city in 1885, it became the oldest art museum in the Western United States, a title it still holds. Some paintings even vanished for fifty years in the old mansion's basement before resurfacing in 1940.

VoiceMap's Sacramento walking tours trace the Crocker name from the Central Pacific's offices in Old Town to this gallery, following how one family's railroad fortune quietly became the city's civic art collection.