Making History Blog

Michelle Noe is a local artist known for her intricate hand-drawn designs that capture the natural beauty of her Mendocino surroundings. In a nod to Mendocino's famous connection to the television series Murder, She Wrote, she created a design for the Kelley House Museum’s Murder, She Wrote Festival. Michelle Noe, left. Michelle recently added her designs to the Spoonflower Marketplace, which offers on-demand printing onto over 50 different [...]

SOUTH of MAIN – Discovering the Lost Buildings of the Mendocino Headlands is available on the Kelley House Museum website, under the Exhibits tab. The exhibit takes visitors on a walk back in time, when the south side of Main Street was lined with more than twenty buildings that are no longer there. https://www.kelleyhousemuseum.org/exhibits-south-of-main/ The post office, the meat market, a photo gallery, Chinese stores, jewelry [...]

The Spring exhibit at the Kelley House Museum opens today! “Conservation Forever: 50 Years of Mendocino Land Trust” runs from April 2nd to June 1st, 2026, and celebrates five decades of the organization’s remarkable conservation legacy. If you’ve walked on a trail in Mendocino County, it’s likely you’ve walked on a trail managed by Mendocino Land Trust. Land Trust was founded around a kitchen table in [...]

Nancy Mary Flood was born October 26th, 1885 in a woods camp at Fred Halmke’s sawmill site two miles up Greenwood Creek from the ocean. The town of Greenwood was nonexistent at the time. Cuffey’s Cove, a few miles north on the coast, was where ships came to load lumber. Nancy Mary was named for her grandmother Flood but the name soon softened to Nannie May [...]

Captain David Lansing, circa 1870. David Frederick Lansing was born September 14, 1809, in Albany, New York. From the Albany genealogical records, it appears that the original Lansing (also spelled Lansingh or Lansinck) came to New York from Holland around 1650. Like many New England youths, David went to sea at an early age. His first long voyage was on board a whaler, which [...]

It’s Women’s History Month and the final weeks of the exhibit “A Woman’s Place Was Everywhere: How Working Women Shaped Mendocino” at the Kelley House. This exhibit tells the lesser-known stories of entrepreneurs, nurses, artists, teachers, madams, and philanthropists who laid the foundation for the Mendocino we know today. The women featured are only a fraction of the many who have had a significant impact on [...]

Byrd Baker and his whale sculpture, 1976. (Photographer: Nicholas Wilson, Gift of Bruce Levene) On March 15, 2025, the Kelley House Museum hosted four original members of the Mendocino Whale War Association: Heidi Cusick Dickerson, Barry Cusick, Sally Welty, and Lee Welty. Also present was Shana Hadley, granddaughter J.D. Mayhew, who was a founding member of the Mendocino Whale War Association. The panel discussed [...]

Studio portrait of James Nichols. (Gift of Nannie Escola) On October 15, 1879, the Beacon reported Mendocino had been “thrown into a state of excitement hitherto unparalleled by the occurrence of a shocking calamity … two of our most esteemed citizens were atrociously murdered and a third wounded within four miles of our town, their comrades narrowly escaping death.” What made these murders so [...]

Edith Nichols, 1896. The French may be glad to die for love, as the old song goes, but Auggie Heeser was willing to live for it – a very long time. Heeser, son of pioneer Mendocino Beacon publisher William Heeser, fell in love with Edith Nichols when he was 21 and she was 15, but 50 years passed before she married him. Dante met [...]

Ford Family tintype. First row, seated, left to right: Mrs. Martha P. Hayes Ford, Ella Jane Ford, Jerome B. Ford and Susan Fidelia Ford. Second row, standing, left to right: Jerome C. Ford ("Chester"), Catherine Pauline ("Katie") Ford and Charles Denslow Ford. Dated November 1869. (Gift of Alice Earl Wilder) For much of U.S. history, being a mother and wife was more than a [...]