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
Where does Big Sur begin and end? Mabel settles it, then takes you the whole way — San Simeon to Point Lobos, stop by stop. Now with our interactive map and free PDF drive guide.
Family spotlight
Engineer at Sans sawmill on Mill Creek. Kept the great boiler going. Swore like a trooper but quoted Shakespeare and the Bible. Had cabin filled with flowers. Called 'Old Cap' for sea voyage with Nautical Survey along California coast 1890.…
story
A rattlesnake struck Ed Plaskett's horse on the mountain mail trail. The horse left the county. The story has a happy ending — eventually.
story
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 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
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 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.
story
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.
235 stories · 1762 family members & friends · 678 places — and the home page changes every few days. Come back soon.
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