by Sarah Nathe, Kelley House Museum Board Member The French may be glad to die for love, as the old song goes, but Auggie Heeser was willing to live for it -- a very long time. Heeser, son of pioneer Mendocino Beacon publisher, William Heeser, fell in love with Edith Nichols when he was 21 and she 15 (Beacon, June 29, 1956), but 50 years passed [...]
by Anne Pierce Cooper, Kelley House Museum Curator This looks like a sweet group of friends enjoying an evening together and quite obviously posing for the camera. Some look more aware of the presence of the lens than others. The mystery behind this photograph is that we know just enough about it to compel us to want to know more. On the back of the original, [...]
by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Volunteer On a wet winter morning, few things are better than shelter, a hot cup of coffee, and a story, especially a local one. In 1938, a steamer ran aground off the Mendocino Coast. Built in 1918 in Toledo, Ohio, as a military ship, she was christened the Lake Cayuga. With the end of World War I, she was repurposed as [...]
by Anne Cooper, Kelley House Museum Curator Having recently lived without electric power here on the Coast, it is not as difficult to imagine the lives of those who came before the phrase “screen time” came into use! Our next exhibit at the Kelley House Museum will take a look at how people chose to spend their free time before the arrival of electronic gadgets. Not [...]
by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Volunteer If you read Part I of this topic last week, you know that Fort Bragg is the home of the first Pacific Coast cigar raft. As early as 1889, coastal lumber companies experimented with smaller oceangoing rafts on Big River, and had successfully pulled a 700-foot articulated raft to San Francisco. Eager to increase capacity and further drive down shipping [...]
There is a new special collection in the archives of the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino named The Point Cabrillo Light Station Collection. The material was provided by the Point Cabrillo Lightkeepers Association (PCLK) and includes architectural drawings, photos, maps, and correspondence relating to the construction and early maintenance of the Light Station. Physical access to these records is by appointment only at the Kelley House Museum [...]
by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House volunteer One of the strangest ocean-going crafts to grace the seas was built locally in Fort Bragg. Hundreds of feet long, brown, tapered at each end, it was sometimes mistaken for a whale or described as a giant “Perfecto” cigar. Invented to bypass high shipping costs, the cigar raft was cheaper and safer transportation—at least in theory. Developed in the 1880s [...]
by Katy Tahja, Kelley House Volunteer Recently, I went down to the basement archives in the Kelley House Museum, walked over to the subjects file cabinet, pulled out the drawer starting with the letter A and what did I find? Accidents! I must say, Mendocino Coast residents in days gone by found some unusual ways to maim and kill themselves and these events got excellent newspaper [...]
by Marty Simpson The first two dwellings illuminated by Edison's improved light bulb in the fall of 1880 were the home of Francis Upton and Sarah Jordan's Boarding House, both in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Upton was an employee of Edison’s laboratory and the boarding house was home to some of Edison's single male employees. As might be expected, gas stocks subsequently took a sharp downturn. [...]
by Tonia Hurst A little more than 125 years ago, the Mendocino Coast was alive with activity as men moved redwood from the forests down to the coast where it was gathered and sorted, milled or split, and then loaded onto ships headed for San Francisco and elsewhere. Before the Panama Canal, all building materials had to be shipped around the horn. The discovery of local [...]