By Anne Cooper The Kelley House Museum will be the scene of holiday cheer and good vibes on Friday, December 2nd from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.. We are offering our members, their guests and those who join at the door, a holiday gathering complete with libations and food. The 1861 William and Eliza Kelley home will be decorated for the season in keeping with the [...]
by Tonia Hurst The last native turkey of California (Meleagris. californica) foraged here more than 10,000 years ago, and what we know of it comes to us only through the fossil record. It disappeared probably due to climate change. Had you wanted a Thanksgiving turkey more than one hundred years ago, you would have bought one or raised one of your own. The native bird, where [...]
by Tonia Hurst A drifting skiff and an attentive night watchman kicked off one of Mendocino County’s strangest maritime mysteries one quiet afternoon in 1921. Around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 13th, had you been looking out to sea, you might have noticed a boat racing towards Mendocino Bay from a distance due west. She pulled into harbor and drew close to the blowhole, where her [...]
by Tonia Hurst If you visit the Kelley House Museum Archives and go down the short flight of stairs into the chilly vault, it’s not hard to imagine you are diving for knowledge—especially where abalone are concerned. Should you chance to don a pair of white gloves and take a look through the old, bound copies of The Beacon, the public’s concerns over the misuse of [...]
by Tonia Hurst What do people and sea otters have in common? Well, for one thing, the love of a particular single-shelled mollusk more commonly known as the abalone. What many people don’t realize is how Mendocino became a premier location for abalone fishing, nor do they realize how lucky we are that our wise predecessors conserved this resource for us—their future generation. Delicious and desirable, [...]
by Tonia Hurst Living on the coast has its advantages and such was the case on the morning of October 17, 1924, when the mighty USS Shenandoah flew over Mendocino en route to Fort Lewis, Washington. The first of four U.S. Navy rigid airships, the Shenandoah was built between 1922 and 1923 in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and modeled after the Zeppelin L-49. Her infrastructure was built [...]
Patrons of the Kelley House Museum’s speakers series, “A Sunday Afternoon With . . .” will have the opportunity of hearing Sarah Bodnar and Gowan Batist, speak on their year of eating locally. Their experiment, although it took place in 2013, fit so well with our current exhibit on the history of procuring food for work and families of the North Coast; that we invited them [...]
by Tonia Hurst On a quiet morning in October of 1900, the steam schooner, Sunol, burned to the waterline while at anchor in Little River. Built in 1890 in Alameda by the Pacific Shipping Company of San Francisco, the Sunol was 132’ long with a 33’ beam and a carrying capacity of 258 tons—the equivalent of 375,000 board feet of timber. It took just 68 days [...]
By Katy Tahja As the fall season returns, our thoughts may also turn to harvests, family meals and food shared with friends. In keeping with such thoughts, we’d like to draw your attention to the cookbook sitting on Eliza Kelly’s china cupboard in the kitchen of the Kelley House Museum. Published in 1892, it’s stamped as belonging to the private library of “Mrs. Alexander McCallum of [...]
We all have to die sometime. If you’d like to see how some of your fellow representatives of humanity addressed this fact, and hear their stories, consider joining the Cemetery Tour, offered by the Kelley House Museum on Saturday, October 1st, beginning at 6:00 p.m. Your tour guide at the cemetery will be none other than “J.D. Johnson.” Who was J.D. Johnson (note use of past [...]