This week we’re talking about the first of a two-part history of brothels in Eureka and how the women of the red-light district kept the city in the black. And we’re running down some noteworthy music shows around the county. Hit subscribe for weekly updates on Humboldt stories.
Humboldt history
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Return of The Valley of the Giants
For nearly all of that century, the 1919 made-in-Humboldt movie The Valley of the Giants was thought lost. In 2010, one surviving print surfaced in an archive in Russia. Film historian Edward Lorusso of Maine started a crowd-funding campaign to translate the silent movie’s Russian inter-titles (dialogue and narrative in a silent film) into English […]
Posted inNews
Humboldt History, Maui Fires and Fair Baking
This week we’ve got a historian’s look back on how Japanese people fared in our county in the wake of the Chinese Expulsion. We’re also sharing a first-hand account of the fires in Maui from a reserve Ferndale police officer who lost his family home. Finally, a dispatch from the county fair’s baking competition. Hit […]
Posted inNews
Salmon Runners, Kinetic Racers and Anti-Chinese History
This week we’re looking at the athletics and activism that make up the Salmon Run, raising awareness of the ecological and cultural impacts of the Klamath Dams on the cusp of their removal. And in the wake of the Kinetic Grand Championship, we look back at the winners and flippers of this year’s art and […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Chinese Again in Humboldt, Part Three
Editor’s note: This story, which originally ran in the Ferndale Enterprise, includes racist language in quotations from historical newspaper articles. On Sunday, Sept. 30, 1906, one day after a mixed-race workforce of Chinese and Japanese men and white women arrived at the Starbuck-Tallant Co.’s salmon cannery in Port Kenyon, a mass meeting took place in […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Covered Bridges of Humboldt County
If you’ve flown anywhere in the last few years, you probably — unwittingly — walked through a covered bridge, what airlines call a “jetbridge,” the moveable corridor that links the terminal with the plane. We don’t usually think of a jetbridge as a covered bridge, of course — that’s reserved for those lovely single-lane timber […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Dolbeer’s Donkey Engine
“… improvement is the order of the day, and there is no reason why the ox team should not make way for the steam engine as the stage coach has the [railroad] engine.” — Humboldt Times, July 31, 1881 Depending on your point of view, the Dolbeer Steam Donkey was the greatest labor saver in […]
Posted inNews
NCJ Preview: Abortion Access, Native Foodways for Youth
This week, for our Health and Wellness issue, we’re talking about local barriers to abortion access, despite legal rights. Funding, transportation, Catholic-run hospitals and can make it difficult to make reproductive choices here in Humboldt. We’ll also look back at the tragedies of deadly illegal abortions through Humboldt’s history. We’re also checking out how a […]
Posted inNews
Heading for Charlie Moon Way
This summer during the Eureka Street Art Festival, artist Dave Young Kim painted a mural depicting a Mandarin duck and Ben Chin, the first Chinese American to open a business in Eureka in 1955, 70 years after the mass expulsion of Chinese people from the town. That mural, emblazoned with the word “hometown,” stands in […]
Posted inNews
Moderne Beauty
Living inside a movie theater is a fantasy many cinephiles have surely entertained, but few have indulged. George M. Mann, builder and original proprietor of the Eureka Theater, was one of the few. Mann worked from the 1920s through the 1940s to build a chain of movie theaters that would eventually span from Klamath Falls […]
Posted inNews
NCJ Preview: The 1935 Timber Strike and One Last Taste of Summer
We’re looking back at Humboldt mill workers’ fight for higher wages against the timber barons amid the Great Depression. It’s a wild tale of picket lines, tear gas, violence police escalation and hung juries that ends with three people killed and a framed Tommy gun at the Eureka Police Department that’s still a bit of […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Gone After Dinner
Cork-down wine bottle chandeliers light Marcelli’s Italian Restaurant from the chipped green linoleum counter on one side to the corner that was once walled off during the spot’s time as an Italian deli but is now decorated with framed news articles. Outside the front windows, cars flash by on Fifth Street’s three lanes as a […]