The collection includes notes on early California academic institutions and clippings, pamphlets, papers on Mills College, Mount Tamalpais Military Academy, and the College of California. These were used to prepare an article "Church Sponsored Schools in Early California" in the Pacific Historian, vol. 20, no. 2 Summer 1976, pp. 158-166. The notes and class paper of Bob Richards, a student in Drury's class, History of Christianity on the Pacific Slope, are also included in the collection. Richards class paper is titled, "A Report of California Schools, Academies, Seminaries, Institutes, Colleges and Universities, as Recorded in the Occident Between the Years 1868-1873, March 1958." The collection also includes some original flyers and announcements from California schools and correspondence (1959-1976), primarily between Dr. Clifford Drury and Dr. R. Coke Wood, regarding publishing articles by Drury in the Pacific Historian, or the Stockton Corral of Westerners Far-Westerner, or Valley Trails. The correspondence also mentions a published debate between Don Chase and Drury prompted by Drury's article on Jedediah Smith. (See Pacific Historian article " Another Myth Answered" vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1973, pp. 43-48, passim, pp. 49-51.)

Clifford Merrill Drury (1897-) earned an M.A. (1928) from the San Francisco Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (1932). He was an assistant pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California (1921-1923) and at the American Community Church, Shanghai, China (1923-1927). He was subsequently a pastor at the First Presbyterian Church, Moscow, Idaho (1928-1938). He then began a teaching career, serving as professor of Church History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary (1938-1964). Author of over 24 books and numerous articles, Drury is well-known for: First White Woman Over the Rockies (1963-1966); Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon (1973); Nine Years With the Spokane Indians (1976); Diary of Elkanah Walker (1976); and, Chief Lawyer of the Nez Perce Indians (1978).

Collection is open for research.