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
A shelf of level land a thousand feet above the sea: the Dani place, where Gabriel Dani built a one-armed empire and Lucia got her name.
Family spotlight
Margaret Voss Schmidt Krenkel (1876-c.1960), known as "Mother Krenkel," was a beloved figure of the Big Sur coast who lived in the Los Burros Mining District for over half a century. EARLY LIFE: Born in San Francisco "among the sand dunes near the Barbary Coast" to German immigrant parents. Her fat…
story
Crocodiles in the Chagres, fever in the air, two boys lost from sight all day on the jungle trail — the family's 1852 shortcut to California.
story
Major Joseph Plaskett's St. Croix sugar fortune met its reckoning the day the slaves were freed.
story
'Well Mabel, isn't it about time we got married?' She said her father would never allow it. She was wrong — and the family got its chronicler.
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Ten dollars on paper for 1,523 acres: the 1922 deed to Hearst's agent that scattered the families and ended 53 Plaskett years in Pacific Valley.
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Two centuries after a Plaskett ran a Caribbean plantation, a Plaskett represents those islands in Congress.
mabel poem
A day's ride up a steep mountain trail with two companions, to lie beneath the willows at Wesley's spring — a place that appears on no map. We found the ground: Wesley Plaskett's section in the Oat Hills, inland from Jolon.
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