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
City-bred Margaret Krenkel rode a mule to her own wedding at Los Burros and dug her well by hand — the real-life 'Hannah' of the coast.
Family spotlight
Mary Price Alderson was born April 22, 1840 in Lewisburg, Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia). She was the eldest daughter of Governor Samuel Price of Lewisburg. Her mother was a granddaughter of Colonel John Stuart, "the pioneer of Greenbrier." She married Major J.C. Alderson on Februar…
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Conrad Kotts married two Plaskett sisters — and stood at Trenton when Washington took it.
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In five months of collecting, a self-taught Big Sur carpenter sent Alice Eastwood six plants new to science — and she named two of them for him.
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The Army took the Jolon country in 1941 — but the church the Plasketts built still holds services for soldiers.
gold mines
Organized 1876, transformed by Willey Cruikshank's Last Chance strike in 1887 — and gone by 1897, burned and grown over. The rise and fall of the coast's gold district, and the lost town of Manchester.
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Where William Lucas built his first cabin in 1869, campers now pitch tents — and his soapstone hearth is still there.
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How a coast pioneer's wife became the beloved historian of the Big Sur country in the pages of The Land.
235 stories · 1762 family members & friends · 678 places — and the home page changes every few days. Come back soon.
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