Mendocino Village: A New England Town Built by Redwood and Disappearance

Looking at Mendocino from the highway, the first impression is New England. The water towers, the white clapboard churches, the pitched rooflines against the headland sky. It looks like it was carried here from coastal Maine. In a way, parts of it were.

Mendocino was founded in eighteen fifty-two by a San Francisco lumber company that had identified the old-growth redwood forests of the Big River and Noyo River drainages as the most accessible virgin timber on the California coast. The man who organized the initial operation, Henry Meiggs, sent a steam-powered gang sawmill up the coast and established what locals initially called Meiggsville. The architecture that followed came with the New England mill managers who ran the operation. They built what they knew. The Congregational church, the Cape Cod houses, the water towers: they are the management class building a home away from home on a coast that looked nothing like the one they came from.

What that framing leaves invisible: the workforce that ran the mill was far more diverse than the architecture suggests. A significant Chinese community lived and worked in Mendocino from the eighteen sixties through the Chinese Exclusion Act era of the eighteen eighties. Workers lived across the Big River from the main village. They served as water carriers, cooks, and mill hands. The Kwan Tai Taoist temple the community built on Albion Street still stands today as a California historical landmark. Exclusion-era enforcement and the contraction of the mill economy caused that community to decline sharply across a generation, even though the temple itself survived.

The Pomo peoples whose land the mill occupied are also absent from the architecture. The Cape Cod houses survived. The communities that made the mill possible did not leave equivalent structures behind.

What you are driving through is both the most photogenic Victorian village on the California coast and the place where a more complicated history was very thoroughly built over.