The Kelley House Museum loves a good history mystery, and recently we had a query about a redwood sculpture named “Kelley’s Girl.” The correspondent said all he knew was that his parents had purchased the statue in Mendocino in the early 1970s. Did Kelley’s Girl have something to do with Mendocino’s Kelley family, or did the museum have other information about it? At first, no one [...]
Stop by the Kelley House Museum at 45007 Albion Street in Mendocino! Visit our gardens, and explore the inside of one of the first homes built in Mendocino. The museum is open Thursday-Monday, 11am - 3pm. Kelley House Museum, July 2024. (Photographer: Robert Dominy) Our current exhibit is “Paint the Town: The Art of Kevin Milligan.” Kevin Milligan’s gorgeous oil paintings capture the breathtaking [...]
July 21, 1926 - A summer sale began at the Mendocino Hat Shop. The store advertised in the Mendocino Beacon, offering greatly reduced prices on their current inventory. Rose Cole opened the Mendocino Hat Shop, which featured straw and trimmed hats for ladies and children, in 1924. This business was located in the eastern part of a now-demolished building on the south side of Main Street. [...]
Alice Earl Wilder, granddaughter of Jerome B. Ford, wrote several letters to Beth Stebbins and Dorothy Bear recounting her adventures as a child in Mendocino. Last week we published one about Mendocino’s early years; below is another one of her letters, this one about her childhood memories. This article by Mary Stinson was originally published in the Mendocino Beacon on August 2, 2013. Summer was [...]
Caspar Mill Pond and Log Chute. Men on rafts can be seen moving the logs away from the bottom of the chute to clear the landing area and sorting the logs into pockets in the pond according to species and size. Logs were brought from the woods to the mill via railroad. The log chute connected the terminus of the railroad at the top of the [...]
Alice Earl Wilder, 95, at the Ford Family reunion in 1984. Alice Earl Wilder was the granddaughter of Jerome Bursley Ford, one of the founders of Mendocino. Her letters to Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins in 1973 contain reminiscences of her summers spent in Mendocino as a child and later as an adult. The letter below was found in the Kelley House archives by Mary [...]
Morning sunlight warms the northeast corner of the historic Kelley House in these two photographs, taken 115 years apart. Located at 45007 Albion Street, the house was one of the earliest built in Mendocino on a prime spot overlooking the ocean. Eliza Kelley in her Garden, 1909. (Gift of Margaret Kelley Campbell) In the black and white photograph from 1909, Eliza Kelley, then 84 [...]
The June 6, 1914 edition of the Mendocino Beacon announced that Mendocino would celebrate the Fourth of July for the first time since 1908. Those interested in contributing to the town’s plans were invited to attend a meeting that Wednesday at the Bank of Commerce (today’s Out of This World), on the corner of Main and Kasten Streets. Subsequent Beacons published plans for a two-day “clean” [...]
Elevated View of Kasten Street in Mendocino, 1908. (Gift of Cora Hervilla) This black and white postcard, with the title "Kasten Street, Mendocino, Cal.,” shows an elevated view looking north-northeast over several historical buildings, many of which are still standing. The building with the false front in the foreground on the far left was Granskog's Eagle Saloon. Built in 1907, the saloon was forced to close [...]
This is a slightly condensed version of an article originally printed in the Mendocino Beacon on March 7, 2013. On October 17, 1870, a fire broke out in Mendocino on the corner of Main and Kasten. It started about 3 a.m. in the Saint Nicholas Hotel, which stood where Gallery Books is today. Mendocino’s newspaper at the time, the Independent Dispatch, reported that the fire “spread [...]