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 [...]
Alice Earl Wilder, 95, at the Ford Family reunion in 1984. Alice Earl Wilder was the granddaughter of Jerome Bursley Ford, one of the founders of Mendocino. Her letters to Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins in 1973 contain reminiscences of her summers spent in Mendocino as a child and later as an adult. The letter below was found in the Kelley House archives by Mary [...]
Morning sunlight warms the northeast corner of the historic Kelley House in these two photographs, taken 115 years apart. Located at 45007 Albion Street, the house was one of the earliest built in Mendocino on a prime spot overlooking the ocean. Eliza Kelley in her Garden, 1909. (Gift of Margaret Kelley Campbell) In the black and white photograph from 1909, Eliza Kelley, then 84 [...]
The June 6, 1914 edition of the Mendocino Beacon announced that Mendocino would celebrate the Fourth of July for the first time since 1908. Those interested in contributing to the town’s plans were invited to attend a meeting that Wednesday at the Bank of Commerce (today’s Out of This World), on the corner of Main and Kasten Streets. Subsequent Beacons published plans for a two-day “clean” [...]
Elevated View of Kasten Street in Mendocino, 1908. (Gift of Cora Hervilla) This black and white postcard, with the title "Kasten Street, Mendocino, Cal.,” shows an elevated view looking north-northeast over several historical buildings, many of which are still standing. The building with the false front in the foreground on the far left was Granskog's Eagle Saloon. Built in 1907, the saloon was forced to close [...]
This is a slightly condensed version of an article originally printed in the Mendocino Beacon on March 7, 2013. On October 17, 1870, a fire broke out in Mendocino on the corner of Main and Kasten. It started about 3 a.m. in the Saint Nicholas Hotel, which stood where Gallery Books is today. Mendocino’s newspaper at the time, the Independent Dispatch, reported that the fire “spread [...]
Excerpt from Mendocino Historical Review Vol. XXVI, Summer, 2012. “Belonging to Places: The Evolution of Coastal Communities and Landscapes between Ten Mile River and Cottoneva Creek.” The remoteness of the northern Mendocino County coast has for most of history demanded self-sufficiency of the people who have made their homes here. V. K. Chestnut and Edward Gifford discuss long lists of native plants harvested by indigenous peoples [...]
June 9, 1940 - California Governor Culbert Olson and Secretary of State Paul Peek spoke at the dedication ceremony for the new bridge over Russian Gulch. Following the speeches by Governor Olson and Secretary Peek, the Governor’s party had the honor of being the first to drive across the newly constructed bridge. Other motorists waited three more weeks for construction to be completed. The bridge opened [...]