During his long and peripatetic life, Martin Mason Hazeltine lived in many places. Born in Vermont in 1827, he was raised with his seven siblings in St. Charles, Illinois. In 1850, he came west in search of gold, following in the footsteps of his younger brother George, but things didn’t pan out and the brothers …
Continue reading "Pioneering the Image: the Photography of M.M. Hazeltine"
According to poet Alice Walker, “hard times require furious dancing,” though the traditional idea of a Hard Times Dance is something altogether different. Similar to the Calico Balls of the mid-nineteenth century, which were started for debutantes and morphed into Civil War-era fundraisers for soldiers and wartime widows, a Hard Times Dance was part fun …
Petaluma, once known as the "egg basket of the world," was home to the first, commercially successful egg incubator (developed by Lyman Byce and Isaac Dias and sold through the Petaluma Incubator Company.) That, along with hard work and the introduction of the Single Comb White Leghorn chicken, were the spur to the town's dominance …
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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 …
If you haven't heard of a cigar rafts, that's not a surprise. I hadn't heard of them either when I happened upon a reference to a "cigar raft" in the notes of Nannie Escola, former school teacher and Mendocino's most prolific early historian. I relish the sense of sisterhood I share with her when I …
