The Preston house and property with snow. The small building to the right ofthe unidentified man is the Preston carriage house, which became the ArtCenter gallery. 1932 Everyone likes to talk about the weather and the archives of the Kelley House include a fat folder labeled "Weather." Here we look at storms and rain, though there is enough material to write a whole article JUST on [...]
A Mystery School in Albion Why is it a mystery? Because if you check in “What Became of the Little Red Schoolhouse” Volume 1-Mendocino Area, there is no school pictured that looks like this one. Behind the schoolhouse, it looks like the coastline, but it could be a bluff top inland. And, of course, if I have five of the six volumes that make up the [...]
Coastal Lumber Schooner These tidbits of shipping history on the Mendocino Coast started from an investigation into why the Union Lumber Company’s California Western Railroad Navigation subsidiary had the word “navigation” in the title. Well, in 1905 all finished lumber products were sent to the San Francisco Bay Area by sea. It would be a decade before the railroad from Fort Bragg to Willits was finished [...]
Metsker's Atlas of Mendocino County, California, May 1954 As a docent at the Kelley House Museum, I love looking at old maps of Mendocino. While there are many to peruse in the archives there, I made an internet discovery that has entertained me for hours. Google “Historic Map Works” and “Mendocino County 1954” and you will see extremely detailed maps of our county fully indexed by [...]
In a historian’s world, primary resources are original materials which researchers can study in order to write books or articles about any person or subject. If someone collected my handwritten draft of this newspaper article and saved it, they would have a primary resource. Once the Mendocino Beacon put the story in print in a published issue, that story becomes a secondary resource. The Peralta [...]
By Katy Tahja In a recent Kelley House Calendar column on the book “Big River Was Dammed” by Francis Jackson, I wrote a bit about river drives of logs on Big River. Reading Mendocino County Remembered: An Oral History, which is a collection of oral history interviews of county residents born before 1900 and compiled by Bruce Levene, William Bradd, Lana Krasner, Gloria Petrykowski and Rosalie [...]
By Katy Tahja If you didn’t know any better and were not noticing the spelling, you might think “Big River Was Dammed” is about the local watershed’s dark, disturbing history. But this book is about the 27 water-control structures erected by loggers on the river back in the boom days. The dam closest to the mill on the Big River flat was 11 miles upstream; the [...]
In a box of historic resources I was recently given, I found a reprint of a feature story about Mendocino County. It appears to be a magazine piece, extolling the virtues of life in this area, 123 years ago. The article promised: “A region worthy of the closest attention of the traveler on a pleasure bent, the capitalist in search of opportunities with the certainty of [...]