According to the late Charlotte Hoak, daughter of one of the first settlers in Comptche, the town was named after Compatche, a Pomo chief who brought his people through that beautiful area seasonally, as a part of their hunting and gathering, nomadic life. The Pomos told her his name means, "in the valley among the hills, beside the river of potholes"—quite a lot for only one [...]
[John and Elizabeth Carlson, proprietors of the City Hotel, raised their twin daughters and son in the hotel along with John Kupp, Elizabeth’s son from her first marriage. As the children grew, they helped out with the hotel’s operation.] Daughters Elizabeth (Bessie) and Catherine (Katie) managed the hotel dining room but that did not interrupt their educations at the Convent of Notre Dame in San Jose, [...]
A clip from the Independent Dispatch of March, 1871 reads: "The outside of Carlson's Hotel is now receiving the finishing touch of the mechanic's skillful hand. When finished, this magnificent structure will reflect no little credit on Mr. Carlson. If all would display as much enterprise as has this gentleman, a lapse of six months would leave no trace by which one could discover that that [...]
Part 1 of 3; excerpted and annotated from “Mendocino’s Hotels & Saloons,” by Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins. Mendocino Historical Review, June, 1980. John E. Carlson was born in Colson, Sweden on June 20, 1827. When he was 16 years old he went to sea until 1849, when he found himself on a ship bound for California. That was the year nuggets of gold could be [...]
Part 2 of 2; reprinted from the June 1, 2006 Mendocino Beacon; Read Part 1 With the engine-driven Maru, rafts became much longer. A November 14, 1908 Beacon note: "A raft of logs nearly one-third of a mile long, one end invisible from the other, having 1,500 logs, which equaled 800,000 feet of lumber, was moved down the river by the ‘Maru.’ Perley Maxwell was the [...]
Part 1 of 2; reprinted from the May 25, 2006 Mendocino Beacon During all of the early days of our fair Mendocino, logging was king. Once the big redwoods were felled, bucked (cut into movable lengths), and peeled (debarked), they had to be brought to the mill. That involved using jackscrews (like an automotive screw jack), building chutes and skid roads, utilizing horses and oxen and [...]
In observance of the Kelley House Museum’s current exhibition, “Paint the Town: The Art of Kevin Milligan,” we reprint here an excerpt from his, Mendocino: A Painted Pictorial. The book features many of his paintings along with history of the subject in each one. Copies of the book are available for purchase at the Kelley House Museum. When I was a child my mother Jacquelyn Milligan [...]
Alice Earl Wilder, granddaughter of Jerome B. Ford, wrote several letters to Beth Stebbins and Dorothy Bear recounting her adventures as a child in Mendocino. Last week we published one about Mendocino’s early years; below is another one of her letters, this one about her childhood memories. This article by Mary Stinson was originally published in the Mendocino Beacon on August 2, 2013. Summer was [...]
The June 6, 1914 edition of the Mendocino Beacon announced that Mendocino would celebrate the Fourth of July for the first time since 1908. Those interested in contributing to the town’s plans were invited to attend a meeting that Wednesday at the Bank of Commerce (today’s Out of This World), on the corner of Main and Kasten Streets. Subsequent Beacons published plans for a two-day “clean” [...]
This is a slightly condensed version of an article originally printed in the Mendocino Beacon on March 7, 2013. On October 17, 1870, a fire broke out in Mendocino on the corner of Main and Kasten. It started about 3 a.m. in the Saint Nicholas Hotel, which stood where Gallery Books is today. Mendocino’s newspaper at the time, the Independent Dispatch, reported that the fire “spread [...]