Malinda Lo
Blog
May 21, 2009
Photo Friday: History in Mendocino
I’ve got one more batch of photos from my trip up to Mendocino County, this time revealing my unending fascination with old stuff.
If you’ve been to the town of Mendocino, you’ll know that it’s basically all tourists all the time. It also was the town featured in Murder, She Wrote back in the ’80s, and yes, it looks a bit like a small coastal village in Maine.
One of the tourist attractions is the Kelley House Museum, located in a home built in 1861 by William H. Kelley, one of the founders of Mendocino. The museum itself was founded in 1974 by Beth Stebbins and Dorothy Bear, two women who moved to Mendocino from San Francisco. Here they are:
Beth Stebbins (left) and Dorothy Bear (right) - click to enlarge
I have no idea whether or not they were merely roommates. But check out Beth’s tie!
The Kelley House Museum also has an amusing collection of artifacts in the kitchen, including this bottle of Worm Syrup, which claims to cure a whole lot of nasty things:
Worm Syrup: Cures grinding teeth and bad breath!
Upstairs in the museum there was a nursery, complete with creepy dolls (note the slightly cross-eyed glass eyes!) and bears chained up in a little high chair:
Why would you chain up those bears?
The entire town of Mendocino is basically one giant historical preservation project. One of the buildings we walked past was the Kwan Tai Temple, a Taoist temple reportedly built in 1852 by early Chinese settlers. It turns out that there were quite a number of Chinese immigrants to Northern California at this time. Here I am on the steps of the temple:
Kwan Tai Temple in Mendocino, CA
We couldn’t go inside the temple, but I did take this photo of the interior through one of the windows:
Inside the Kwan Tai Temple
After all that historical stuff, we walked along the main street of Mendocino, which faces the ocean. There’s a lot of driftwood that spills up onto the beaches here, and clearly somebody has found a use for it. Look at this neat driftwood sculpture:
Driftwood art
Nature makes fascinating shapes.
Enjoy your weekend!
i got married at the mendocino botanical gardens.
so so gorgeous up there. didn’t realize there was some
asian history sites as well. great fotos, m lo!
i had plans to visit Mendocino while i stayed in San Francisco City last fall, but finally failed this plan, i went to the Napa instead! it’s interesting that there’s a wu-di temple there…
Yes, I was totally surprised that there was so much Asian American history there — I saw several books for sale about Chinese American communities in Mendocino during the 19th century. They’re gone now, but there were quite a few of them back then.