A statue of Colonel Thomas Baker, the city's founder, is in front of the building and is marked as California Historical Landmark #382.

They included 'Whites, Mexicans, and Negroes, some of them once farmers in their own right, tall fair men from the mountains of the South and their wives leading little children, some desperate, many hopeless.

'"[2] The current City Hall was completed in 1954, after the old structure was destroyed in the 1952 Kern County earthquake.

The Department of Water Resources remained at its existing location in Southwest Bakersfield.

[4][5] The California Historical Landmark reads: Col. Thomas Baker's House in 1861