Imagine this: It’s 1888 and you are a small child living on a ranch on the Mail Ridge Road in northern Mendocino County. You see the dust of travelers coming along the roadway and run…
Posts published by “Katy Tahja”
With the demise of the print version of this newspaper I’ve written for for over a decade I thought about what I’d like to contribute to the last issue. I write a lot about local…
When the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino was founded 50 years ago researchers here found that people loved a good shipwreck story and wanted to share their version of a story told to them by…
Live in California all your life and if you love the out of doors there is a bird you’d want to seek out and observe: the California Condor. It’s big, it’s ugly, and to me…
What the heck is a Doghole Schooner and what does it have to do with Mendocino County history? Let me explain. It’s your local history lesson for the day. Once, 130 years ago, there were…
As a docent at Mendocino’s Kelley House Museum researching a book on the Orr Hot Springs area last year I had amassed more information than I could ever possibly use in what I planned to…
Senator John Sanford represented Mendocino County’s interest in state government from 1894 to 1908. Well respected as a teacher and a journalist, “He has an unusually powerful mind capable of analyzing motives behind deeds” the…
With the local timber industry ever waning in Mendocino County it’s educational to look back and see what a role logging railroads and lumber mills once played in the local economy. Take logging railroads —…