Ghost Towns Working in the archives of the Kelley House Museum is fascinating because you are always finding tidbits of history that leave you going "Wow! I didn't know that!" Like ghost towns . . . What?? We have ghost towns in our county? You bet we do. Railroads gave us a lot of them. L.E. White's lumber company railroad went out to a split in the tracks and they named it Salsig, or Manzanita. Now within Mendocino Redwood Lumber Company holdings,[... see full page]

Phil Carnahan at his scanner.  The boxes under his window contain all the microfilm he’s using for his project, and there are more on the way.  History and genealogy buffs in Mendocino County have recently been given a great resource by Phil Carnahan, a tech-savvy buff himself who has undertaken to scan and make searchable documents of all the microfilm from the newspapers published in the county from their beginnings to the present time.  Phil began that project in 2015 and,[... see full page]

Northern California Fires from space, July 6, 2008 NASA image Someone recently contacted the Kelley House Museum to ask if there had been any major wildfires right along the Mendocino Coast. Docents checked resources and talked to old-timers and all we could come up with was the 1931 Comptche Fire, about 15 miles inland, and the 2008 Mendocino Lightning Complex Fire that burnt from the Elk Coast to Covelo, starting 129 fires that consumed 54,817 acres countywide. Native peoples used controlled burning to[... see full page]

The Preston house and property with snow. The small building to the right ofthe unidentified man is the Preston carriage house, which became the ArtCenter gallery. 1932 Everyone likes to talk about the weather and the archives of the Kelley House include a fat folder labeled "Weather."  Here we look at storms and rain, though there is enough material to write a whole article JUST on the 1964 floods.  A huge storm in 1865 produced the following news. "Old Boreas, with his[... see full page]

One hundred years ago today, on February 14, 1919, the Mendocino Study Club held a special evening meeting to celebrate both the triumph of Cupid and the end of World War I. The armistice with Germany had been signed November 11, 1918, and the Paris Peace Conference had begun on January 18, 1919, so the Study Club event was timely. Almost three million American men had served in World War I -- including a number from little Mendocino -- and[... see full page]

Ad for "The Trilby Shoe", circa 1900 Putting together the clothing exhibit “Form & Function of Fashion: The Way We Wore,” now showing at the Kelley House Museum through March 18th, I was able to learn a lot about things I typically don’t think too much about. For instance, our lovely women’s hats, gloves and fans were once viewed as absolutely essential if you were to be considered fully dressed. None of these items are found in my closet. One item that hasn’t dropped off the “must-have” list is[... see full page]