Part 1 of 3; excerpted and annotated from “Mendocino’s Hotels & Saloons,” by Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins. Mendocino Historical Review, June, 1980. John E. Carlson was born in Colson, Sweden on June 20, 1827. When he was 16 years old he went to sea until 1849, when he found himself on a ship bound for California. That was the year nuggets of gold could be [...]
Part 2 of 2; reprinted from the June 1, 2006 Mendocino Beacon; Read Part 1 With the engine-driven Maru, rafts became much longer. A November 14, 1908 Beacon note: "A raft of logs nearly one-third of a mile long, one end invisible from the other, having 1,500 logs, which equaled 800,000 feet of lumber, was moved down the river by the ‘Maru.’ Perley Maxwell was the [...]
Part 1 of 2; reprinted from the May 25, 2006 Mendocino Beacon During all of the early days of our fair Mendocino, logging was king. Once the big redwoods were felled, bucked (cut into movable lengths), and peeled (debarked), they had to be brought to the mill. That involved using jackscrews (like an automotive screw jack), building chutes and skid roads, utilizing horses and oxen and [...]
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 [...]
This photo was taken between 1919 and 1925 at the intersection of Lansing and Ukiah Streets, looking north. On the left side of the street is the Masonic Hall, built between 1866 and 1872, then a small store, followed by another small commercial building attached to a 2-story structure where carpenter/undertaker J. D. Johnson stored his burial caskets. Beyond that is a garage, which would be [...]
The Kelley House Museum loves a good history mystery, and recently we had a query about a redwood sculpture named “Kelley’s Girl.” The correspondent said all he knew was that his parents had purchased the statue in Mendocino in the early 1970s. Did Kelley’s Girl have something to do with Mendocino’s Kelley family, or did the museum have other information about it? At first, no one [...]
Stop by the Kelley House Museum at 45007 Albion Street in Mendocino! Visit our gardens, and explore the inside of one of the first homes built in Mendocino. The museum is open Thursday-Monday, 11am - 3pm. Kelley House Museum, July 2024. (Photographer: Robert Dominy) Our current exhibit is “Paint the Town: The Art of Kevin Milligan.” Kevin Milligan’s gorgeous oil paintings capture the breathtaking [...]
July 21, 1926 - A summer sale began at the Mendocino Hat Shop. The store advertised in the Mendocino Beacon, offering greatly reduced prices on their current inventory. Rose Cole opened the Mendocino Hat Shop, which featured straw and trimmed hats for ladies and children, in 1924. This business was located in the eastern part of a now-demolished building on the south side of Main Street. [...]
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 [...]
Caspar Mill Pond and Log Chute. Men on rafts can be seen moving the logs away from the bottom of the chute to clear the landing area and sorting the logs into pockets in the pond according to species and size. Logs were brought from the woods to the mill via railroad. The log chute connected the terminus of the railroad at the top of the [...]