By Anne Cooper, curator According to the website “weather-warehouse.com” which provides historic weather data, the total precipitation for 1914 in Fort Bragg was 17.91 inches. During that year, the maximum precipitation in a single 24 hour period was 2.51 inches. The weather station from which these data were derived is noted as “Fort Bragg 5 N”. That information seems odd, however, because according to a very reliable local historian, Denise Stanley Stenberg, that would mean half of the total rainfall that year[... see full page]

By Anne Cooper, Curator As someone new to the archives of the Kelley House, it has been great fun making discoveries. These are not made idly, I hasten to add, but as a result of the wish to share with our community through the pages of the Beacon. In so doing, this rather timely ‘Greeting Card’ of old surfaced. Its small size makes one think of the practice of leaving ‘Calling Cards,’ a form of communication used by well-to-do folks of[... see full page]

Falling apart at the seams? That’s what happened a little over a century ago to a coastal steamer belonging to the Caspar Lumber Company. The Samoa carried a crew of 21 men and 380,000 feet of lumber on the morning of January 28, 1913. She was making her usual run from Caspar to San Francisco through a thick blanket of fog. No GPS or even radar in those days. The Samoa hit the beach known as Ten-Mile, not far from[... see full page]

Since 1850, more than 160 vessels have met their fate along Mendocino’s rugged coastline while the shouts of drowning sailors and passengers have been heard above the roar of the surf. The most famous shipwreck was the Frolic, a Baltimore clipper ship bound for California from China. A former opium runner between Bombay and Hong Kong, the bulk of the Frolic’s cargo now consisted of silks, ceramics, lacquered ware and even a fabricated house that it loaded in Canton and[... see full page]

Rex Smith, our Kelley House docent and local taxi driver, was 'discovered' by Dr. Bunny Vreeland, a talk show host at Mercury Broadcasting. Listen to the interview here.[... see full page]

A postcard in the archival collection at the Kelley House Museum brought to mind the fact that not all of us are always able to spend the holidays in our homes. The postcard includes the sentiment, “May this Season’s joys remain/Growing more strong as the year grows long/And Christmas comes again.” Photographs of the steam schooner, Pomo, while anchored off shore and at the wharf, in addition to an oval photo insert, depict Point Arena, ca. 1905. Built in 1903 in[... see full page]