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.
story
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.
story
My grandmother drove the whole California coast to see if anywhere was more beautiful, and came home. Now a fifth of the Plaskett Fire is burning ground that last saw flame in 1970 — the same fire that took the last cabins at Manchester.
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.
story
The family says Sarah Barnes came of French Acadians expelled in 1755, and that her mother was first cousin to a signer of the Declaration. One of those is likely; the other does not survive checking.
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.
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