David and Charlotte Lansing in 1865 with their five daughters. Back row: Mary and Franny. Front row: Kate, David holding Helen, Julia, and Charlotte. (Alice Earl Wilder Collection, Kelley House Museum) Continued from last Thursday… When David Lansing arrived in Mendocino in 1852, his plans included bringing his family up from San Francisco as soon as possible. To make this possible, he built one [...]
This 1863 Carleton Watkins photo shows David Lansing (left) and Jerome Ford (right) posing by the cabin they lived in when they first arrived in Mendocino. (Kelley House Museum Photograph) Historians agree that what gold did for California, redwood timber did for the Mendocino Coast. A rough and tumble group of men and women came to California in search of gold and wealth. Many [...]
Back in January [of 1993], Hugh Curtis from Ukiah asked if we would be interested in taking possession of a cannon he had found back in 1959 while snorkeling for abalone in Buckhorn Cove, south of Little River. "Well OF COURSE we would," said I. It appears that it was not actually a cannon, but a Lyle Gun made in the 1880s or '90s. Lyle [...]
Joseph Silva Neto was born in 1844 on Sao Jorge Island, the Azores. He came to California when he was 20 years old, first working in the lumber mills of Humboldt county. In 1875 he married Maria S. Armas, who was also from the Azores Islands. Joseph's brother George had a hotel in Mendocino and, when he needed a hotel clerk in 1878, he sent for [...]
Ida Mary Peterson Jaakola Peterson was the daughter of Andrew and Anna Peterson, their fourth child and the only one to live a long adulthood. She was born on September 28, 1892 in Comptche. She first married Isaac Jaakola, but he died of influenza in November of 1918 at the age of 27, leaving her with three young children: Irene, Oliver, and Sylvia. His dying wish [...]
Reprinted from the February 25, 1993 Mendocino Beacon and annotated with additional information. Caspar Creek, and later the town of Caspar, were named after Siegfried Caspar, an early settler of German descent who raised cattle in the vicinity. Construction of the sawmill near where Caspar Creek meets the ocean commenced in 1861, after the owners, William Kelley, Captain Richard Rundle, and Eugene Brown purchased 5,000 acres [...]
Reprinted from the January 21, 1993 Mendocino Beacon For our mill here on Big River, the first large redwoods were cut down entirely with double-bitted axes, and cut into logs with axes. In those very early logging days it might have taken two experienced men a week to bring down a big tree, including a few days to prepare a bed or cushion of smaller trees [...]
Robert Foster Andrews in his later years. (Florence Andrews Collection, Kelley House Museum) In 1984, the Kelley House supplied local historian Robert Winn with material he used in his College of the Redwoods course, “New England in Mendocino.” Dorothy Bear shared some of that information in the column below, which was first published in the November 8, 1984 Mendocino Beacon. The best sources in [...]
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from walking around the charming town of Mendocino, it’s that the town itself is alive. It breathes. It moves. Mendocino even talks to us. As I take people around town and tell them about the haunted houses, phantom horses, and the hotel guests that refuse to leave after 150 years, I realize that the ghosts also talk to us. They [...]
Coming home from a hard, day-long job, it’s likely that you want to sink onto your couch and pour yourself a beer. The loggers of Mendocino felt the same way 150 years ago. After chopping, milling, and shipping tons of redwood trees, sipping a cold one was a perfect way to relax and forget about the limbs you almost lost. Luckily, the area was not short [...]