Among the surviving papers describing Jean MacCallum is a letter she wrote as a child. It’s typed, addressed to her grandmother, Eliza Kelley, and charming. It was written after the MacCallums moved from Glen Blair, just north of Fort Bragg, to San Francisco. Jean was born in Glen Blair when her parents, Daisy and Alexander, left their celebrated Mendocino mansion to oversee a logging enterprise purchased [...]
In a box of historic resources I was recently given, I found a reprint of a feature story about Mendocino County. It appears to be a magazine piece, extolling the virtues of life in this area, 123 years ago. The article promised: “A region worthy of the closest attention of the traveler on a pleasure bent, the capitalist in search of opportunities with the certainty of [...]
Out of the Kelley House Archives comes the story of Miss Ethel Nelson, born in Mendocino 1883, daughter of Elizabeth May (Bessie) Carlson and Captain Henry Nelson, owner of the Wilson Hotel on Main Street in Mendocino, as well as ship captain for the barkentine, Servia. Henry and Bessie married in Mendocino on January 18, 1882. She was the granddaughter of a pioneer who brought a complete [...]
Fury Town was not the only enclave where mill workers congregated in the olden days along Mendocino’s coast. Up north, the town of Fort Bragg prospered. As the name implies, Fort Bragg began as a military outpost. Built in 1857, it was named after Confederate general, Braxton Bragg, and established to police local Pomo tribes. The native people had been forced onto a 25,000-acre reservation stretching [...]
Alvin Mendosa of Mendocino identified the men in this 1979 photograph by John Uhlar as John Mendosa (left) and Walter Jackson (right) in front of the Mendocino Post Office.