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Bears, Cougars, and Wild Animals of Pacific Valley
Winter in Pacific Valley meant bears in the stock pens and cougars in the hills.
Today’s featured story
From Mabel’s pen
South Monterey County Writers Part II
A 2007 appreciation of Mabel herself — 'Belle' Sans Plaskett with her horse Cleo — by historian Susan Raycraft.
Family spotlight
Edward Lucas 1659–1740
Father of Margaret Lucas (b. 1708) who married William Plaskett (d. 1748). Married Bridget Stott. The Lucas family were Quakers in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania area. The "Lucas" middle name carried through generations of the Plaskett family comes from this line.…
From the album
More to explore
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The Rattlesnake on the Mail Trail
A rattlesnake struck Ed Plaskett's horse on the mountain mail trail. The horse left the county. The story has a happy ending — eventually.
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Riding with Ed Culver: When the Mailman Was the Coast
Mabel wrote him up in 1961: the mailman who filled grocery orders and played bass viol in the symphony. Her grandson rode in his van to Monterey — back when the coast ran on trust.
place history
The Schoolteacher Brides of Pacific Valley
The county kept sending young women to teach the coast's children — and the Plaskett boys kept marrying them. How two brothers married two sisters, and the schoolhouse became the town.
place history
Before Big Sur: The Mendocino Years
Fifteen years before Pacific Valley, William Lucas Plaskett rehearsed his dream in Anderson Valley — where the family named a daughter Mendocina, left their name on a mountain meadow that still carries it, and stopped twelve feet short of a different life.
place history
The Marvelous Shut-In Valley (San Francisco Call, 1897)
The earliest published account of Pacific Valley — a full-page 1897 San Francisco Call feature on 'the Marvelous Shut-In Valley,' the unexplored pocket of the Coast Range that William Lucas Plaskett found, settled, and never left.
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Jerry Lewis's Yacht Pussycat Wrecked Near Gorda
The 1966 Lopez Point wreck and the debris remembered at Willow Creek — what the record proves, and what a ten-year-old on the beach saw.
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