Water towers in Mendocino
We just got back from a wonderful road trip to Northern California and Oregon, which I will probably tell you more about in the next couple weeks. On our last day we checked out Glass Beach in Fort Bragg (coming soon…) and then drove down to the town of Mendocino. I can barely remember it, but I think we stopped here briefly in 2000 on a road trip from Seattle to San Diego. Anyway, I definitely can’t remember seeing all these Water towers.
But first things first: Coffee. We enjoyed a humongous, delicious Latté and a Blueberry Buttermilk Muffin @ GoodLife Café and Bakery. Super busy on Sunday, July 3rd but absolutely worth the wait. Interesting folks and excellent people watching while sipping on my favorite hot liquid and chatting with my family. After that we shopped for some gifts to bring back home @ the Mendocino Country Store and @ Out Of This World.
During our stroll through town we noticed all these fun wooden water towers and I started reading a bit about them.
For more than a century these towers have captured the attention of visitors. The early settlers were blessed with plenty of water from nearby creeks and rivers. You only needed a windmill tall enough to catch coastal winds to power the pump and a tank positioned high enough to provide the necessary water pressure. With these two things you could facilitate the luxury of piped water in the house. Today, most of the windmills have disappeared, but lots of the towers are still standing.
Unlike Fort Bragg Mendocino has no central water supply to this day so many of the original towers are still in use.
Some of them completely restored, some in a rather brittle state. Some of them are used as an arts studio, a gift shop or even a vacation rental. If you want to stay in a Water Tower in Mendocino, you should check out these websites:
Mendocino Village Water Tower,
Sweetwater Spa and
You can learn more about the preservation of these unique structures by visiting the Kelley House Museum.
What else? Many films and movies have been filmed in and around Mendocino and Mendocino County, including Overboard, The Karate Kid, Part III, Forever Young and The Majestic. Mendocino was also depicted as turn-of-the-20th-century Monterey in the James Dean classic East of Eden and 9 episodes of the TV series Murder, She Wrote were filmed in Mendocino.
