If you’ve ever been to the Kelley House Museum, you no doubt have seen the 150-year-old wedding dress on display in the front hall. The two-piece brown plaid taffeta jacket and skirt belonged to Phoebe Allen Marsan, who married John Peter Marsan in Kansas in the late 1860s. Their only child, David Allen Marsan, was born March 19, 1870, in Ossawatomie, Kansas. The young family headed [...]
by Sarah Nathe, Kelley House Museum Board secretary Two weeks ago at the opening of the new Kelley House exhibit, “Medicine on the Mendocino Coast: Say Ahh…”, I was looking at pioneer druggist C.O. Packard’s prescription ledger from 1882 and wondering about some of the potions and pills he dispensed. I noticed a “Morph. Sulph.” prescription for a Mrs. Johnson, a “Cocaine Wine” prescription for a [...]
Is the practice of medicine an art, a science, a business or a combination of all three? As in other parts of the country, the Mendocino Coast experienced an evolution of medical practice: from something which was in the hands of regular folks at home (mostly women); to something primarily in the hands of doctors (mostly male), nurses (mostly female), and a variety of technicians. Along [...]
Consider events in the lifespan of Mendocino pioneer Edwards C. Williams as an example of how much times have changed, and yet how we are able to relate much of the past to our own lives. When E. C. Williams joined the New York Volunteers in 1846, he answered the call to fight what few today would argue was a just war. California belonged to Mexico [...]
People living before the advent of penicillin and other antibiotics or even antiviral medications, which we take for granted, were no strangers to death. However, the influenza pandemic, which came in the wake of the end of the First World War, occurred on a scale so devastating that it took more victims than had the Great War itself. As we cross the threshold of 2018, the [...]
In late December of 1916, near the Boom on Big River, the cast and crew of a new silent film began work on their latest project. The Promise, produced by the Yorke Film Corporation and distributed by Metro Pictures, was one of a series of movies featuring the pairing of two popular actors: Harold Lockwood and May Allison. The Promise was not a period piece, but [...]
A little over one hundred years ago, it took a heavy dose of determination and grit just to get a high school team to a basketball game. The beginnings of Mendocino High School basketball didn’t present a rosy picture. Back in 1907, writing in the school annual then known as “The Occident,” a student concluded that, “The Mendocino High School has accomplished little in the way [...]
By William Lemos, Kelley House Museum member Dateline: 1942. The men were overseas fighting dictatorships, fascism, and tyranny. While they were gone they wrote letters home describing the conditions they lived with daily, and they often described longings they had to return to the normalcy of their previous lives. These letters needed to be delivered, and the U.S. Postal Service was there to provide that service [...]
by Sarah Nathe, Kelley House Museum Board secretary We left off last week puzzling over the incongruities inherent in the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization for white people that patterns its costumes, rituals and terminology after early Native Americans. Photos in the Kelley House archives show Red Men parading around town in Indian getups, tomahawks, tom toms and American flags in hand. Grown [...]
by Sarah Nathe, Kelley House Museum Board secretary While visions of Pilgrims and Wampanoags, and turkeys, danced in my head last week, my thoughts just naturally turned to the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization very big in these parts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Photographs in the Kelley House archives show groups of Red Men, tricked out in what can [...]