Humboldt County Historical Society

Nature is burgeoning, birds and bees are disporting themselves, and couples are joining in matrimony. These glorious springtime traditions likewise graced life in the early days-and no one had to worry about the decline of the honeybee.

The James Simpson home, known as the Simpson-Vance house and still standing at the corner of 9th and G Streets in Eureka, is decorated for the double wedding of Josephine Ada Simpson and Julius P. Wunderlich, and Anna Louise Simpson and Hugh B. Stewart, on July 25, 1901.

As today, flowers were a key element of early day weddings, and, unlike today, the steamship could play an important nuptial role. Of course gifts were given, and cans and shoes were surreptitiously tied to the back of the newlywed conveyance.

Many weddings took place in the home, followed by a breakfast or dinner, with bouquets covering every surface and fern garlands strung though every room and draped on all the furnishings. In 1885, John Melendy and Nellie Clark were married at the bride's home beneath "a beautiful floral horseshoe that hung from the ceiling," reports a local newspaper. Lucky floral horseshoes were also presented as wedding gifts.

What other gifts might the nineteenth century couple get? If Mr. and Mrs. William Carson were on your guest list, you might acquire "one-half dozen silver coffee spoons, gold-lined," which is what Ida Roberts and Charles Wheeler received from the Carsons at their wedding. Among their other gifts were a piano lamp, a china chocolate pitcher, an illustrated copy of Romeo and Juliet, and a silver pickle fork.

Their wedding, in early April of 1892, was a high society affair written up on the front page of the Humboldt Times. The wedding was at the First Congregational Church in Eureka with about 500 guests. Pastor Griffith Griffiths stood under a floral arch and three floral bells. Festoons of flowers covered the platform, were suspended from the ceiling and hung around the organ loft. Tucked within her floral bower, the organist, Miss Maud Middlemiss, played Mendelssohn's "Wedding March."

After providing the music for many weddings, Miss Middlemiss herself was married the following spring, in April of 1893, to Silas A. Vance. The April 8th Nerve reports that's after a quiet home wedding, the couple boarded the steamship Humboldt, with all its flags flying in the breeze. In the newlyweds' stateroom, bouquets and ivy garlands "climbed up the sides of the room" and filled "every conceivable nook." The bride was "completely overcome" as the ship's gong sounded and she looked out at her friends assembled on the wharf, who waved many goodbyes with fluttering handkerchiefs.

A steamship played an important role in a very different kind of wedding just two months later when young F. S. Kennedy and sixteen-year-old Miss Edna Palmer eloped on the North Fork. As reported in the Nerve of June 3, when the ship approached San Francisco, the lookout man at Point Reyes was alarmed to hear the North Fork's whistle tooting sharply and the steamer's bell ringing violently; additionally, "he saw that pandemonium reigned on the steamer." Imagining it must be a mutiny, the lookout signaled the police boats which met the steamer as it entered the bay. The sight of the police boats might have alarmed the young runaways, except that of course by this time they were already married: the ship's captain had performed the ceremony and then called for the ship's whistle and bell to be sounded in honor of the union.

That is a romantic story-who doesn't want to be married by a ship's captain?-and it even had a happy ending: the bride's parents, who had opposed the match, sent their best wishes to the couple. For more on Humboldt history, visit www.humboldthistory.org.