The Kelley House Museum needs your help to solve a history mystery. While cataloging a photograph album this week, we came upon a postcard with a photograph of three men standing on some lumber at a mill. There is no information about who these men are, when the photograph was taken, or even where the lumber mill is. We are left without any breadcrumbs to follow [...]
The Kelley House’s new exhibit, Angela Lansbury: Muse of Cabot Cove, is a tribute to the beloved actress and her impact on Mendocino. The exhibit examines her illustrious life and career, in particular her role as Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote.” The iconic TV series had an impact on Mendocino that ranged from hiring locals for the filming to boosting tourism. Most of all, the [...]
In preparation for the upcoming Day of the Dead, I thought I’d discuss the language of funeral flowers. The current exhibition at the Kelley House, “Good Mourning, Mendocino: Funeral Rites and Customs,” features a number of floral arrangements that highlight some of the meanings inherent in sepulchral floral bouquets. Learning the special symbolism of flowers became a popular pastime during the Victorian era. There were guidebooks [...]
Recently, the Kelley House Museum received a generous donation of teaching materials dating from between 1891 and 1906. The items had been collected from various sources and pasted into a large attendance book from 1901. Among the artifacts are notices from the Board of Education, newspaper clippings with math puzzlers, and graduation exam questions for the Grammar Schools of Mendocino County. The book belonged to Matilda [...]
I recently completed my time as the collections intern at the Kelley House Museum as part of my MA in Museum Studies coursework at the University of San Francisco. The project I was assigned was to help catalog a collection left to the museum by a descendant of the Kelley family, Rosemary Maulbetsch, the great-granddaughter of William and Eliza Kelley, who passed away in 2017. The [...]