By Anne Cooper, curator According to the website “weather-warehouse.com” which provides historic weather data, the total precipitation for 1914 in Fort Bragg was 17.91 inches. During that year, the maximum precipitation in a single 24 hour period was 2.51 inches. The weather station from which these data were derived is noted as “Fort Bragg 5 N”. That information seems odd, however, because according to a very [...]
By Anne Cooper, Curator As someone new to the archives of the Kelley House, it has been great fun making discoveries. These are not made idly, I hasten to add, but as a result of the wish to share with our community through the pages of the Beacon. In so doing, this rather timely ‘Greeting Card’ of old surfaced. Its small size makes one think of [...]
Falling apart at the seams? That’s what happened a little over a century ago to a coastal steamer belonging to the Caspar Lumber Company. The Samoa carried a crew of 21 men and 380,000 feet of lumber on the morning of January 28, 1913. She was making her usual run from Caspar to San Francisco through a thick blanket of fog. No GPS or even radar [...]
Since 1850, more than 160 vessels have met their fate along Mendocino’s rugged coastline while the shouts of drowning sailors and passengers have been heard above the roar of the surf. The most famous shipwreck was the Frolic, a Baltimore clipper ship bound for California from China. A former opium runner between Bombay and Hong Kong, the bulk of the Frolic’s cargo now consisted of silks, [...]