What better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than by looking at this interesting four-generation photograph of women who, among them, brought 21 children into the world and look none the worse for wear. The photo, from the Kelley House Museum archives, was taken in Fort Bragg in 1921, when little Florence Amelia Goldsam was just over one year old. Her mother was 31, her grandmother 51, [...]
Because we mark the 110th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake this week, I decided to spend a little time sifting through our seismic past. Though named after one city, the April 18, 1906 quake roared along a 290-mile rupture of the San Andreas fault from San Juan Bautista to Shelter Cove. Accounts in the Kelley House archives reveal that, from Manchester to Usal, landslides [...]
“A rough and tumble with a grizzly,” watercolor by H. Bullock Webster, 1878, from the University of British Columbia collection. Whether or not Cuffey’s Cove got its name from the grizzlies in the area (Mendocino Beacon, Kelley House Calendar, February 18, 2016), bears were abundant there—at least until the European settlers started shooting them in the early 1850s. Among the first documented Cuffey’s Cove bear [...]
When their VW busses brought the first flower children to the Mendocino Coast in the late 1960s, the locals—who had lived in a sort of time warp for the previous 30 years—did not know what to make of them. Mostly, they took a dim view of their abundant hair, their communal lifestyles, and their use of mind-altering substances. When the local newspaper reported that a “hippie [...]