Stories of Community and Place

New Book

Available Now

​Mendocino Refuge:
Lake Leonard & Reeves Canyon

​mendocinorefuge.com
Join author Dot Brovarney’s eight-year journey as she documents this Mendocino watershed from geological time to the present. Mendocino Refuge tells a multifaceted story of this wild place through its human inhabitants, and the plants and animals who share it.
Meet the wildlife and diverse plant species of this watershed.
Click for Species List
Meet some of the hardy folk who chose to live in this rugged canyon in California’s North Coast Ranges.
• Before settlement, the Masut, Native Pomo people, stewarded this land, including its watershed in the upper Russian River watershed

• in 1921, Una Boyle chose a life on her own at the Lake, among the old growth redwoods that she, like her parents before her, refused to log

• Hazel Putnam returned to her family’s canyon property on Mill Creek where with shotgun at the ready, she protected the canyon from interlopers

• In 1911, artist Grace Hudson paddled the lake that her great uncle had settled in 1873

• Tapping Reeves, the canyon’s namesake and others harvested canyon redwood and Douglas fir

• After a war of words in the early 1960s, Susanna Bryant Dakin saved her favorite old growth redwood tree and others in the upper canyon

Other Books by Dot Brovarney

The Sweet Life:
Cherry Stories from Butler Ranch
Edited, with additions, by Dot Brovarney

The Sweet Life offers a rich bounty of tales with a common thread: the Mendocino community’s deep respect, gratitude, and love for a pair of Ukiah ranchers and their cherry orchard. Storytellers recount the joys of picking cherries at Butler Ranch and remember the warmth and openheartedness that characterized George and Ella Butler. The legacy of the Butlers’ commitment to land and community continues, at the Butler Community Orchard on Ridgewood Ranch north of Ukiah.
 
• Full color
• 100+ pages
• 75 photographs
• stories by community members
• $18
Available at Mendocino Book Company, Ukiah
[email protected] / 707 468-5940
-or email me at-
[email protected]
Remember Your Relations:
The Elsie Allen Baskets, Family, and Friends
by Suzanne Abel-Vidor, Dot Brovarney, and Susan Billy



Co-published by Grace Hudson Museum, Heyday Books, and the Oakland Museum of California, 1996
Available at Grace Hudson Museum Shop and on-line sites
[email protected]