More than a century on the Big Sur coast
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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.
From Mabel’s pen
The three-story log house on the Little Sur — Jeffers' 'zebra-striped' landmark of 1885 — still standing when Mabel wrote, paint and poetry intact.
Family spotlight
Elizabeth [surname unknown] married William Plaskett Jr. before March 1775 in Trenton, New Jersey. She was disowned by the Quakers along with her husband. She survived the 1791 Indian attack during the family's river voyage to Ohio. After her husband and son Joseph drowned circa 1796, she administe…
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Mabel's childhood ran on sawdust and creek water at her father's mill among the redwoods.
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The Mill Creek rough named Jack Dempsey once settled an argument with a cast-iron skillet.
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A repossession man got a piano halfway down the Mill Creek trail, gave up, and left it to the forest.
gold mines
In May 1911 Dudley Plaskett picked solid gold nuggets out of the creek mouth — then followed them upstream.
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After the best run of the mill, miner Lawrence Cardoza vanished — and so did the gold.
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W.B. Post started at a whaling station near Lucia in 1850 and ended with a ranch that carried his name.
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