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Mendocino County
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Cleone
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Cleone was pioneered by Duncan MacKerricher. He was born in Quebec Canada in 1836. In 1864 he arrived in the Wild Coast and went to work in Caspar for two years saving his money and biding his time. In 1866 he moved to Whipple Station, established a dairy, and began buying land for what was to become the large and prosperous Laguna Ranch. In 1883 a Post office was established and the government named it Kanuk in honor of the Canadian living nearby. Mrs. MacKerricher didn't like the name and succeeded in getting it changed to Cleone, a Greek word meaning beautiful and gracious. By 1884 Cleone was a boisterous lumber town with the post office, a sawmill, two saloons, two hotels and a store. Late in the nineteenth century the Mill Creek saw mill was able to produce 40,000 board feet of redwood lumber per day.
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Cleone sits in about the middle of the coastal fog belt that extends all along the Wild Coast. It has been estimated that approximatly 1.4 million acres of old growth mature redwood trees were located in the Wild Coast in 1850. The coastal redwood tree has very little resin which helps to make it imprevious to fire and it has a very high level of tanin which helps to repel insects. The trees in this forest in the middle of the ninteenth century ranged in age from eight to fifteen centuries. The wood is an excellent building material and the forests were well placed to help build California following the Gold Rush. By 1972 92% of these trees had been turned into lumber and only a few groves of old growth had been preserved as State and National Parks.
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There are two primary types of redwood tree in California. The coastal redwood is the Sequoia sempervirens while it's cousin, the Sequoia gigantea or Big Tree, lives further inland in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A mature coastal redwood tree is huge, frequently growing to a height well over a hundred feet with a trunk diameter of from 12 to 16 feet. The largest diameter on record is 23 feet. The tallest towered 364 feet into the air. The largest tree ever recorded in terms of lumber produced from it yielded enough boards to build 22 five room houses!
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