More than a century on the Big Sur coast
mabel article
Her earliest known piece, under the pen name Belinda Brown - eighteen years before Coast Trails. How Cox's Hole became Pacific Valley, who named it, and the July the family left Fresno because San Joaquin was getting “too thickly settled”.
From Mabel’s pen
'Wherever you may go, people ask about Nepenthe' — the cliff-top restaurant where the coast forgets its worldly cares.
Family spotlight
Mason by trade from Cumberland, England. First record in New Jersey as witness May 19, 1732. Married Margaret Lucas Margerum October 29, 1734 at Falls, Bucks County Quaker meeting. Councilman in Trenton after 1745 incorporation.…
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The family says Sarah Barnes came of French Acadians expelled in 1755, and that her mother was first cousin to a signer of the Declaration. One of those is likely; the other does not survive checking.
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My grandmother drove the whole California coast to see if anywhere was more beautiful, and came home. Now a fifth of the Plaskett Fire is burning ground that last saw flame in 1970 — the same fire that took the last cabins at Manchester.
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A month before it burned, I turned seventy at the cabin and took my grandchildren up Plaskett Ridge to a swing that hangs out over the ocean. That swing is now 875 feet inside the fire. The cabin is 820 feet outside it.
mabel article
Her earliest known piece, under the pen name Belinda Brown - eighteen years before Coast Trails. How Cox's Hole became Pacific Valley, who named it, and the July the family left Fresno because San Joaquin was getting “too thickly settled”.
mabel article
'This old house is getting shaky...' — watching the Mansfield home, a Pacific Valley landmark for generations, hauled away.
mabel article
Two coast natives drive north to Oregon and back — Mabel's own road trip up the Pacific edge she loved, September 1961.
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