In October of 1891, a particular form of entertainment came to town. The Pawnee Medicine Company provided “free entertainments in Murray’s Hall” in Mendocino. The editions of the Mendocino Beacon for both Saturdays, October 10 and 17, included brief mentions of the show.  In the first story, readers of the Beacon learned that the Pawnee Medicine Company’s performers had begun their circuit the previous Tuesday and had “held forth to good houses every evening since.” What was a Medicine Show and[... see full page]

Any organization that has been around for a while acquires a history. The Kelley House Museum has a relationship with the Mendocino Coast, as a non-profit devoted to history itself. While there’s the story of the house -- the Kelley family, the town of Mendocino, its life and times, which now span three different centuries -- there’s also the history of this organization. It began with two women, Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins. They wanted to enjoy a place and at[... see full page]

While researching online for this article, I searched for the date when telephone service first came to Mendocino County. All sorts of hits came up, but alas, they addressed the issue of cellular service! Much of Mendocino County is still known for its remoteness, and one website actually stated that residents and visitors alike can tell when they’ve entered the confines of the county by the disappearance of their signal bars (depending on the service provider). As all serious students[... see full page]

by Sarah Nathe It is generally accepted that reunions are about people. You take a trip back to a place where you once lived in order to spend a couple of days with people you haven’t seen for awhile: family members, classmates, teammates, military buddies, work colleagues, summer camp friends. You spend most of the time “catching up” and reminiscing about the great times you had together whenever. That is certainly the focus of the new exhibit at the Kelley House[... see full page]

When thinking of working in a saw mill, many of us who have never done so have a tendency to focus solely on the space where logs were sawn into lumber; but there were other functioning spaces at “the mill” that were needed in order to arrive at that task. In short, it was all about getting the logs to the saws and then the lumber to the yards. Coming across this photograph in our collection brought to mind the fairly[... see full page]

When John F. Wheeler came to Mendocino in 1878, few would have suspected his checkered past. He was married, though we don’t know anything of his wife. He had been trained in dentistry somewhere along the way. Born about 1843, his place of birth was variously recorded as either Arkansas or the Cherokee Nation. His father was born in Tennessee and his mother in Indian Territory. Either way, he may have been raised in Oklahoma. He traveled to points west[... see full page]