With the Highlight Gallery now in residence at the Odd Fellows Hall on Kasten at Ukiah Streets, one of Mendocino’s venerable landmarks is once again brought back to life. For several years it has stood mostly empty – but the doors are open again. Beautiful objects occupy the well-lit, high-ceilinged rooms, and voices fill the air like it did 143 years ago. High School Circus Parade [...]
The Kelley House has two postcards with photographs of the now gone Southside Hotel in Albion. Until recently, that’s about all we had to remember the once popular complex of buildings that Bob Kerr and Joe Rushing started in 1903. The Southside Hotel on the south side of the Albion River in 1904, with its dance hall under construction behind it. (Kelley House Museum Photo Archives) [...]
Everett Racine’s photograph of the Mendocino Grammar School and its neighborhood, taken between 1921 and 1929 before it burned down. According to reports, the building was situated on the lot's center so as to separate the boys/girls play yards. The first Mendocino High School is the large building at the top with a rounded cupola, replaced with the present building in 1949. The first Saint [...]
Concrete Sidewalks Come to Mendocino by Karen McGrath and Carol Dominy This charming photograph, taken by our very own Mendocino photographer, Perley Maxwell, captures a group of friends, family, and neighbors on Christmas Day, 1906. (Emery Escola Collection, Kelley House Museum) At the front, the smiling man on the left with beard and bowler is Dr. Frank Peirsol. Behind him stands Henry Jarvis, co-owner of the [...]
Recently, the Kelley House received an email from a woman named Heather requesting any history we might have on a house located at 11275 Lansing Street. We love questions like this, as we’ve been collecting information on structures and the people who occupied them for almost 50 years, and we’re eager to share what we have. But we were stumped. The inquirer called it “the McCloud [...]
The latest chapter in the library history of Mendocino began back in 1974, when the Mendocino Study Club, keeper of the community’s lending library, was faced once again with the task of finding a new home for its club rooms, and also for its ever-growing collection of books. As we covered in an earlier column, the Club rooms in the much loved Kellieowen Hall, on the [...]
Our previous column bookmarked the story of Mendocino’s many libraries at the part where the venerable Mendocino Study Club has become the patron for the town’s bibliophiles. Daisy Kelley MacCallum in 1952, the year before she died, sitting on the sun porch of her home on Albion Street in Mendocino. In 1938, the Club unexpectedly needed another place to hold their meetings. Since 1924, they had [...]
It is the 1930s, the Great Depression has started, and we begin another chapter in the story of libraries. Girl Scout Intermediate Bookbinding Badge from the 1930s, showing an open book. Our two previous articles recounted earlier reading rooms and libraries on Mendocino’s Main Street, and then in the building on the corner of Ukiah and Lansing Street. Since its construction by W. H. Kelley in [...]
This is the second segment in a series of articles about the libraries in Mendocino. The previous column took us from 1883, when the first library opened in the Good Templars’ Hall on south Main Street, to 1909. That year the county went “dry” and the libraries sponsored by these temperance organizations had completed their mission. The Public Library and Reading Room in the early 1900s [...]
Main Street in Mendocino looking east in the mid 1930s. Templars Hall, site of the first library, is the building on the right just in front of the fire hall with the bell tower. It was demolished in 1938. Mendocino’s first public library must have had an enviable ocean view. Called the Free Reading Room, it opened in April of 1883 on the second floor of [...]