Templeton is located within the former Rancho Paso de Robles Mexican land grant and was founded in 1886 when Chauney Hatch Phillips of the West Coast Land Company sent R.R. Harris to survey 160 acres set aside for a town to exist south of Paso Robles as part of the company's larger purchase of 63,000 acres. These 160 acres were to be laid out in business and residential lots with 5–12 acre parcels, with the town to be named "Crocker" after a Vice President of the Southern Pacific Railroad, Charles F. Crocker; however, Crocker instead chose to name the town "Templeton," after his two-year-old son, Charles Templeton Crocker.

As the population of the little settlement of Templeton increased, a school was needed to educate the children. In 1887, the Templeton school district was created out of territory that had been part of the Paso Robles school district. A three-room, three-teacher schoolhouse, built on a block of land donated by the West Coast Land Company, was used until 1923 when another structure, still in use, was completed. Templeton High School classes began in 1916, and the first graduating class, with eight graduates, was in 1920.

This school bus was purchased new in 1933 by the Templeton School District and used as a bus until 1949. The 1932 bus was restored over a 5-year period thanks to hundreds of hours of the museum’s volunteers.

"Nowhere on earth is there a more beautiful spot, with the distant blue mountains; the rounded hills covered in spring with wild oats, where not cultivated; the wide, park-like valley dotted with immense oaks; the Salinas river, with its tree-fringed banks—alders, willows, sycamores and oaks—and spicewood breathing its fragrance on the air. . .” - Annie L. Morrison, San Luis Obispo County and Environs, 1917.