top of page
California's Olden Golden Days
Search
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 22, 20232 min read
Conservationist Minerva Hoyt
A woman born and raised amid the lush landscapes of 19th century Mississippi seems an unlikely candidate as a conservationist of...
27 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 15, 20232 min read
Inventor Harriet Russell Strong
Harriet Russell Strong was a brilliant woman who overcame personal heartbreak and financial catastrophe to become an agriculturist, a...
6 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 8, 20232 min read
Doctor Elizabeth Follansbee
Elizabeth Follansbee was the first woman to be a member of the faculty at a medical school in California, also the first woman admitted...
52 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 1, 20232 min read
Lawyer Clara Foltz
Clara Shortridge Foltz never went to law school, yet she passed the California bar exam in September 1878, after studying law in the...
6 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 16, 20223 min read
Faint Hoofbeats from the Past
Its official name was The Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, but that was too unwieldy, so everyone just called...
4 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 21, 20222 min read
Susceptible to Seizure
In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...
8 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 31, 20224 min read
Cement Craze
Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...
2 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 17, 20223 min read
A Good Man
Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...
110 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 20, 20222 min read
A Spectacular Gateway
Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...
12 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Jul 13, 20225 min read
Affair of Honor
Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...
12 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Apr 19, 20223 min read
Serving California by Sea
In the Age of Sail, not everyone who entered California’s harbors came to settle. In the early 1820s, the ships of many nations began...
4 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Apr 13, 20223 min read
Pony Brings News of Ft. Sumter
By April 1861, California had been a state of the Union for only ten and a half years. As yet, no telegraph lines connected it with the...
3 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 30, 20224 min read
A Remarkable Life
She was a woman of remarkable qualities; a woman who rose from being an uneducated young bride going west in a covered wagon in 1844, to...
50 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Mar 16, 20222 min read
Her Fight for Education
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood was the capable, determined 19th century woman who paved the way for desegregated education for children of...
5 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Feb 23, 20223 min read
Rev. Thomas Starr King
San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church congregation gaped at its new pastor with a mix of curiosity and consternation. Could this small,...
6 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Feb 9, 20223 min read
The Kindergarten Movement
By 1884 California was leading the nation in educational innovations with its system of pre-grammar-school schools, based on ideas...
23 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 10, 20213 min read
Land Laws: Land Grants vs. Homesteads
During the centuries it belonged to Spain, and the few decades it was a province of Mexico, California had no homestead laws that gave...
16 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Nov 3, 20213 min read
Early & Ongoing Partition Troubles
California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...
18 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Sep 8, 20213 min read
Creating California's Counties
In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...
9 views0 comments
Cheryl Anne Stapp
Aug 4, 20212 min read
Invasion at Monterey!
In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...
46 views0 comments
bottom of page