More than a century on the Big Sur coast
True stories of the Plasketts and their neighbors — bears and gold, shipwrecks and weddings — drawn from letters, newspapers, and family memory.
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 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.
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.
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
Ed Plaskett and his brothers built a way to the top of Plaskett Rock — where centuries of seagulls had left a crown of first-rate fertilizer, free for the scraping.
place history
Off Sand Dollar Beach a white-crowned sea stack carries the family's name on every chart of the coast. Bill and Kim photographed it from ridge, point, and sand.
place history
Sixty-some years after Mabel sent her readers to Jade Cove, her great-grandson climbed down the rope to the same tideline — and the green stone is still there.
gold mines
The most told Plaskett story of all: the Nevada silver tunnel sold twelve feet short of the Comstock Lode.
gold mines
The Kings River mine paid handsomely — and financed the venture that lost it all.
place history
A hike up the Mill Creek Trail toward the old Sans sawmill site — the canyon where Mabel Sans Plaskett grew up.
story
Phil McGuire of Gorda could look at your face and hand you your portrait minutes later.
story
At Carson Sink in 1848, the Plaskett wagon company fell in with John C. Frémont's party.
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