by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Museum volunteer The Mendocino downtown of old was a wild and wooly place -- literally. Today, if you browse the narrow alleys and shops around town, or if you are driving a truck on Albion Street between the Kelley House and the MacCallum House, you can’t help but notice the narrow confines produced by on-street parking, two-way traffic, and eager tourists [...]
by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Museum volunteer According to poet Alice Walker, “hard times require furious dancing,” though the traditional idea of a Hard Times Dance is something altogether different. Similar to the Calico Balls of the mid-nineteenth century, which were started for debutantes and morphed into Civil War-era fundraisers for soldiers and wartime widows, a Hard Times Dance was part fun and part fundraiser. In [...]
This photograph from our archives of a young woman wearing a plain blouse and looking at the camera with what seems to be unabashed honesty is one of our Kelley House Museum “history mysteries.” Something about the style of the blouse, the way her hair has been pulled back and the clarity of the photograph made us think that it might be of sufficiently recent vintage [...]
by Anne Cooper, Kelley House Museum Curator How lasting are our friendships and other relationships? Will our facebook posts exist in perpetuity? Answers to these and similar questions may not be forthcoming until we are all figures of the past. The couple shown here, if couple they were, seem to have shared some sort of relationship. It isn’t merely the photograph which suggests this, but rather [...]
Sports historian and longtime Westport resident Steve Cardullo will speak on “Sunday Baseball in Fort Bragg.” His talk will cover the history of baseball and its movement westward after the Civil War, the development of Sunday Baseball and some of the standout players on the Fort Bragg loggers team.
by Katy Tahja, Kelley House Museum Docent While volunteering one Sunday as a docent at the Kelley House Museum, a visitor asked, “How many saloons existed in Caspar in the old days?” I didn’t know, but replied that I’d do some research and write about it. I can now share that information. Much of what I found was in the book that featured entries from the [...]
by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Museum volunteer Far from prying eyes on land as beautiful and forlorn as the Scottish Highlands stood the town of Wheeler. Today, less than fifty-six years later, nothing remains of this once vibrant community but the memories shared by the thirty or so families who called it home. Wheeler sat along the Coast at the mouth of Jackass Creek sixty miles [...]