Coach belonging to the North Coast Stage Line, which ran between Willits and Fort Bragg. Bench seats were very basic and the canvas sides could be rolled down if there was inclement weather. (Kelley House Museum Collection) Many docents here at the Kelley House Museum love stagecoaches. Whether traveling in them or robbing them, this form of early transportation produced many adventurous stories that were published [...]
While working on the history of Mendocino County, which I just finished writing, I was trying to establish if any wineries in this county tried producing what were called wine bricks or grape bricks. It does not seem so, but they were made in Sonoma and Napa counties and their story is fascinating. After 1920 Prohibition laws in the USA said you could not sell, produce [...]
Photograph of the marble grave monument of Mary F. Freathy, located in Evergreen Cemetery. The stone has a bas relief of clasped hands at the top and is crowned by an arch of ivy leaves, supported by scrolled brackets. Down in the archives of the Kelley House, I was working on a research project tracing a local family’s name through graveyard records when I found something [...]
The Bobolink c. 1880, in full sail and fully loaded with lumber. She was a two-masted schooner built in 1868 in Oakland, California by L. S. Allen, with her home port being San Francisco. In 1884, she was sold to Jerome B. Ford of the Mendocino Lumber Company. After a 30-year sailing career, Bobolink wrecked on March 24, 1898, at Kent's Point, south of Mendocino Bay. (Photograph from the Emery [...]
The Schooner J. C. Ford loading lumber under the chute in Mendocino Harbor, c. 1985. Photo from the Alice Earl Wilder Collection, courtesy Kelley House Museum. If there is only one vessel the Kelley House can feature during its current nautical exhibit, the Schooner J. C. Ford is a good choice. In the May 20, 1882 issue of the “Mendocino Beacon” newspaper, it was reported the new three-masted [...]
View of Lansing Street in Mendocino, looking north from Albion Street between 1923 and 1930. The building on the left is known as the Shell Building and was built as a garage in 1923. Fiddleheads and Moody’s Coffee occupy it now. The building next to the garage, (now Rainsong) was known as Kelly or Kaze's Hall and later Kellieowen Hall. Going up the street, the Masonic [...]
Mendocino’s “Chinatown,” located on the south side of West Main Street, as shown on the 1890 Sanborn-Perris map. This land is now a part of the Mendocino Headlands State Park. The Chinese laundry seen here at the corner of Main and Kasten Streets was replaced with a bank building in 1908, and is now the “Out of This World” store. For the current exhibition concerning Chinese [...]
Moving buildings from one logging camp to another near Big River. (William Ferrill Collection, Kelley House Museum archives) If you want to see three words together that might clash with each other, try “logging camp” and “cute.” But I don't care what anyone says, if you look at logging camp cabins being transported on railroad flat cars they are CUTE. When logging operations a century ago [...]
Ghost Towns Working in the archives of the Kelley House Museum is fascinating because you are always finding tidbits of history that leave you going "Wow! I didn't know that!" Like ghost towns . . . What?? We have ghost towns in our county? You bet we do. Railroads gave us a lot of them. L.E. White's lumber company railroad went out to a split in [...]
Northern California Fires from space, July 6, 2008 NASA image Someone recently contacted the Kelley House Museum to ask if there had been any major wildfires right along the Mendocino Coast. Docents checked resources and talked to old-timers and all we could come up with was the 1931 Comptche Fire, about 15 miles inland, and the 2008 Mendocino Lightning Complex Fire that burnt from the Elk [...]