The staff at the Kelley House Museum never cease to be amazed by the material the public presents to us as gifts. Take Auggie Heeser’s book, “First Lessons in Arithmetic” by William J. Milne, Ph. D., LL D. given to us by former Mendocino resident Deborah White. A twelve-year old Auggie Heeser in 1889 and his math textbook. (Kelley House Museum, from the collection of Robert [...]
Christmas is going to be different this year. 2020 has been a difficult year of anxiety, separation, and loss and with the holidays, we should be looking forward to getting together with friends and loved ones to celebrate the season. Tintype image of Richard T. Bourns, a civil war soldier, dressed in a Union Army uniform posing against a painted backdrop of a Civil War camp, [...]
Over the past few weeks or so the history of libraries on the Mendocino Coast has been explored in this Kelley House column. Here is the last segment on library growth on the South Coast. How do you move a Library? One book at a time in a human chain from one location to another in Pt. Arena as the Coast Community Library book collection moved [...]
The latest chapter in the library history of Mendocino began back in 1974, when the Mendocino Study Club, keeper of the community’s lending library, was faced once again with the task of finding a new home for its club rooms, and also for its ever-growing collection of books. As we covered in an earlier column, the Club rooms in the much loved Kellieowen Hall, on the [...]
Our previous column bookmarked the story of Mendocino’s many libraries at the part where the venerable Mendocino Study Club has become the patron for the town’s bibliophiles. Daisy Kelley MacCallum in 1952, the year before she died, sitting on the sun porch of her home on Albion Street in Mendocino. In 1938, the Club unexpectedly needed another place to hold their meetings. Since 1924, they had [...]