→ View All
Laurie Corn – House Soul
Laurie Corn states, "A house can have a soul."
Dentistry4Vets
Listed under: Health Veterans
National Park Entry is Free on April 20!
EQRoy Shutterstock.com
Natural history, state history, and cultural history combine to make Monterey County remarkable.
Start with the bay. From the distance of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it’s more thrilling to the eye than anything on the coast of Italy. This perfect blue arc conceals a deep sea plunge, roughly the size and depth of the Grand Canyon. The fertility of this astonishing coast was strained to the brink in the 20th century, when the sardines were fished out. (Sardines are back on the menu; they thrive because the schools of tuna that ate them are gone.)
The county has a large inland wedge of farmland along the Salinas River, including the county seat, Salinas. But when people hear the name Monterey, they think of Monterey city itself.
In 1602, Captain Sebastian Vizcaino sailed in and named the bay in honor of Mexico’s viceroy, the Count de Monte-Rey. Serious European settling attempts didn’t start for another century or two. The able Spanish monarch Carlos III declared Monterey California’s capital in 1775. In 1822, the Mexicans overthrew the Spanish government and then secularized the missions’ substantial land holdings (circa 1830).
Yankees and Britishers poured in. Alerted in advance to the burgeoning Mexican American war, Commodore John D. Sloat sailed in on the frigate Savanna, raising the stars and stripes over the still-standing Old Customs House. Sloat took the town without firing a shot, except in salute. (The Mexican defenders had already receded to the south to hold the line in Los Angeles.)
Visitors to this state historic zone in Monterey will find the still-standing Old Customs House and a number of notable buildings. These include the one-time residence of William Tecumseh Sherman, and California’s First Theatre. Its rival, the Eagle Theatre in Old Town Sacramento, is a reconstruction of the first theater in the state that was designed specifically as a theater...as opposed to this one. Built from the timbers of a wrecked ship, it was a boarding house and a tavern before someone had the idea to set up a stage and some whale-oil footlights.
Monterey State Historical Park website
They used to call it Giradin’s French House, a hostelry. Now this old adobe is remembered as RLS’s lodgings from August to December 1879. The town and the settings excited the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped. He walked through the out-of-season resort at Pacific Grove—as empty, he said, as a dreamscape. And he hiked alone on the pristine beaches around today’s 17 Mile Drive. The walking helped his health, even as the dampness of the adobe walls in the rainy season inflamed his asthma. He wrote of the incense of the evergreens and the smell and voice of the sea. And he stood enraptured at the evening spectacle of the fog’s arrival: “always noble and always sad.”
Robert Louis Stevenson House
Cannery Row, once a line of clattering factories, is now a tourist attraction anchored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. This popular institution has been educating and entertaining the public for 35 years. Everything from great white sharks to sardines swim in its roundabouts. These days probably a lot of attention goes to the octopus exhibits, given the success of My Octopus Teacher.
MontereyBayAquarium.org
Founded in 1883, this compact but unmissable collection has exhibits on the great migration of monarch butterflies, which have of late become a trickle. (A small parklet nearby is still a landing zone for the insects, with trees sometimes covered with orange and black wings.) A jade boulder indicates the quantity of the semi-precious stone on the Big Sur coast. And there’s one sad exhibit: a taxidermied Carolina parakeet, driven to extinction in the early 1900s.
PGMuseum.org
The Monterey County Historical Society maintains a massive collection of family, city and county archival materials. The society maintains a number of structures relating to the agricultural history of the area, such as a bunkhouse where Filipino farmhands lived, and the Jose Eusebio Boronda Adobe, built in the 1840s. And the society has big plans for the Albert & Pearl Jensen Agricultural Museum & Research Center, a 12,400-square-foot facility.
MCHSMuseum.com
A giant of poetry lived here. This was Robinson Jeffers’ place; he was a conscientious objector in World War II and that hurt his later fame. Reverence for his blank verse still brings fans from around the world to this rocky spot.
TorHouse.org
A gated exception to the law that allows access to all of the California coastline, it costs $10.75 to cruise 17-Mile Drive—and it’s worth every penny. The Pebble Beach Golf Links, built in 1919, is a famous part of the loop. But what’s really remarkable are the timeless beaches. They’re like the most sentimental watercolors any amateur ever painted: too clean and too pretty to be real, and yet they are.
PebbleBeach.com/17-Mile-Drive
This nonprofit group preserves the past by protecting the wildness of the mountain land just east of Big Sur.
VentanaWild.org
The profane, censored and—all in all—heroic writer spent some time on this coast and wrote a book about it. The HML (its motto is “where nothing happens”) hosts interesting characters who make the trek to Big Sur. Cherished folk/rockers the Mekons played there recently.
HenryMiller.org
The Big Sur Historical Society was founded in 1978 to preserve Big Sur’s cultural heritage. Over the years, the society has grown to more than 100 members. Its main asset is the Molera Farm House Museum, which has been closed since the Dolan Fire and will likely not reopen until 2022. Membership meetings are held three to four times a year and usually involve a field trip to an area of local interest.
Big Sur Historical Society
Support California Local
List of local resources, knowledge and information.
You are subscribed!
Look for our confirmation message in your email inbox.
And look for our newsletter every Monday morning. See you then!
You're already subscribed
It looks like you're already subscribed to the newsletter. Not seeing it in the email inbox of the address you submitted? Be sure to check your spam folder or promotions folder (Gmail) in case your email provider diverted it there.
There was a problem with the submitted email address.
We can't subscribe you with the submitted email address. Please try another.
Subscribe