Stories of Community and Place

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Current Projects

New Book – December 2022
Mendocino Refuge:
Lake Leonard & Reeves Canyon

Meet the people who chose to live on the land up Reeves Canyon and at Lake Leonard in the rugged, isolated mountains of California’s North Coast Ranges.

• Before settlement, the Masut, Native Pomo people, stewarded this land, including its watershed, sharing fishing rights with their eastern neighbors, the Kacha

• in 1921, Una Boyle chose to live her 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, visitor Grace Hudson paddled the lake that her great uncle had settled in 1873

• Tapping Reeves, the canyon’s namesake and others, including a group of Boston capitalists, worked to profit from its redwood and Douglas fir forest

• eccentric hunting guide and hermit with the splendid name, Napoleon Americus Poe, proved to be something of a real estate tycoon

• Susanna Bryant Dakin who won a war of words with a logging crew, and saved her favorite canyon redwood and surrounding trees four decades before Redwood Summer

Meet the wildlife and diverse plant species of this watershed, past and present, fed by the waters of Lake Leonard and its healthy old growth redwood and Douglas fir forest.
Where to get your copy:
Mendocino Book Company, Ukiah
[email protected] / 707 468-5940
-or email me at-
[email protected]
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: our 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, holding a place at the Butler Community Orchard and in our hearts always.
 
• Full color
• 100+ pages
• 75 photographs
• stories by community members
• $18
[email protected]