“When we started talking about this exhibit earlier this year, I don’t think it occurred to us — we didn’t even think about it — that it would be fire season,” said Wendy Barker, the director of the Ojai Valley Museum. She added that she felt uneasy about opening the show at a time when the state, yet again, is on fire: in the north, in Paradise, and in the south, with the Woolsey Fire, near Malibu and parts of Ventura County, not too far from Ojai.

But this is California, where these days fires seem to be raging all the time.

Ms. Barker, whose exhibition included the maps of fires that burned near Ojai throughout its history — in 1929, 1932 (for decades the largest in state history), 1948, 1979 and 1985 — said that in the past, after a fire, residents would at least have the respite of believing they would have many years before the next one.

“But do we?” she said. “I don’t know. It’s scary. These aren’t isolated incidents anymore.”

Stephen Pyne, a historian of wildfire at Arizona State University, said it had been a century since a fire in the United States caused deaths on the scale of the Camp Fire. That was the Cloquet Fire, in 1918, in Minnesota, which started with sparks from a railroad and killed nearly 500 people.