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 [...]
Excerpt from Mendocino Historical Review Vol. XXVI, Summer, 2012. “Belonging to Places: The Evolution of Coastal Communities and Landscapes between Ten Mile River and Cottoneva Creek.” The remoteness of the northern Mendocino County coast has for most of history demanded self-sufficiency of the people who have made their homes here. V. K. Chestnut and Edward Gifford discuss long lists of native plants harvested by indigenous peoples [...]
Nathaniel Smith, pioneer and stagecoach driver in Mendocino County, circa 1880-1900. (From the Miriam Matthews Photograph Collection, Open UCLA Collections) The Kelley House Museum’s upcoming exhibition—March 1st through May 27th— will illuminate the life and times of Nathaniel Smith. This exhibition was researched, and this article written by, Guest Curator, Alexander Wood. His work was made possible by a grant from California Humanities, a [...]
Rob Hawthorn sharing ghost stories at the Mendocino Hotel When I moved to Mendocino in 1995, I lived in a fantastic two story Victorian with a water tower, built sometime before 1880. I was already a history buff and a fan of ghost stories, so when my mother-in-law started talking about sensing a “mysterious presence” at the top of the stairwell, I was over [...]
Miles Paoli, born in Mendocino in 1906, was instrumental in bringing radio to the Mendocino Coast. As a young man, Miles was not drawn to school particularly. Miles’ parents, Raffaelo and Emelia, were hard working immigrants who had found opportunity in the logging industry. Later, the Paoli family purchased the hotel on Mendocino’s Ukiah Street, which had belonged to the Borgnas, and had been known as [...]
August 20th-24th marks this year’s World Water Week, a non-profit conference held annually by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI). Since its inception in 1991, World Water Week has become the leading conference devoted to global water issues, featuring a variety of participating organizations, including the United Nations. Each year, the conference seeks to bring together a diverse array of people and professions to develop solutions [...]
Mendocino Presbyterian Church, c. 1873 -1890, from the Kelley House Archives. (Gift of Donald Tucker) This week, the Mendocino Presbyterian Church celebrates the 155th anniversary of its sanctuary on Main Street. Officially dedicated on July 5, 1868, it is the oldest Presbyterian Church in continuous use in the State of California (and it enjoys the status of California Historic Landmark No. 714). The origins [...]