by Sarah Nathe, Kelley House Museum Board Member 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 15 (Beacon, June 29, 1956), but 50 years passed before she married him.  Dante met Beatrice when he was nine years old and burned[... see full page]

by Anne Pierce Cooper, Kelley House Museum Curator This looks like a sweet group of friends enjoying an evening together and quite obviously posing for the camera. Some look more aware of the presence of the lens than others. The mystery behind this photograph is that we know just enough about it to compel us to want to know more. On the back of the original, from the Kelley House Museum’s archives, a note was written: “This is a flash light[... see full page]

by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Volunteer On a wet winter morning, few things are better than shelter, a hot cup of coffee, and a story, especially a local one. In 1938, a steamer ran aground off the Mendocino Coast. Built in 1918 in Toledo, Ohio, as a military ship, she was christened the Lake Cayuga. With the end of World War I, she was repurposed as a merchant vessel and renamed the Dorothy Wintermote, after the daughter of the founder of the[... see full page]

by Anne Cooper, Kelley House Museum Curator Having recently lived without electric power here on the Coast, it is not as difficult to imagine the lives of those who came before the phrase “screen time” came into use!  Our next exhibit at the Kelley House Museum will take a look at how people chose to spend their free time before the arrival of electronic gadgets. Not everyone had much free time, but even the youngest mill workers and their families would have[... see full page]

by Tonia Hurst, Kelley House Volunteer If you read Part I of this topic last week, you know that Fort Bragg is the home of the first Pacific Coast cigar raft. As early as 1889, coastal lumber companies experimented with smaller oceangoing rafts on Big River, and had successfully pulled a 700-foot articulated raft to San Francisco. Eager to increase capacity and further drive down shipping costs, local lumber companies hired leading expert H. R. Robertson, and after a year of[... see full page]

There is a new special collection in the archives of the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino named The Point Cabrillo Light Station Collection.  The material was provided by the Point Cabrillo Lightkeepers Association (PCLK) and includes architectural drawings, photos, maps, and correspondence relating to the construction and early maintenance of the Light Station.  Physical access to these records is by appointment only at the Kelley House Museum (707-937-5791).  One may order images and view the collection online by searching for “PCLK”[... see full page]