With today’s growing debate on global warming and other
environmental concerns, we could learn a lot from Charles Kellogg.
The one-time famous naturalist once lived here in our South Valley
region and played an important role in preserving California’s
magnificent redwood trees.
With today’s growing debate on global warming and other environmental concerns, we could learn a lot from Charles Kellogg. The one-time famous naturalist once lived here in our South Valley region and played an important role in preserving California’s magnificent redwood trees.
Kellogg’s amazing life story is filled with so much relevance for us in the 21st Century that Kim Moreno, a former Morgan Hill resident, turned it into a romantic musical play titled “The Angel of Ever Ever.” As entertainment for the Morgan Hill Historical Society’s quarterly meeting last Wednesday, composer Moreno performed some songs from his theatrical creation.
Let me tell you that Moreno’s tunes and lyrics are filled with passion and pathos. And judging from the play’s intriguing story, he might just have a hit on his hand. The drama focuses on the unusual love triangle between Kellogg, his wife Sarah, and a lonely woman named Gertrude Strong Achilles, the heiress of a massive family fortune from the Eastman Kodak Company.
Kellogg was born on a ranch near Susanville on Oct. 2, 1868. As a child, he loved to wander the woods, studying animals and insects. He was especially enchanted by birds and learned to “talk” to them. Somehow he managed to reproduce with his own voice their musical language with exact pitch and quality.
By the time Kellogg was 22, his amazing bird-song skills gained him national attention. He called himself “The Nature Singer” and fascinated crowds by performing his beautiful warbling on vaudeville tours on the Orpheum Theater circuit.
Kellogg also fascinated scientists. One physicist even used a Helmholtz tuning fork to test Kellogg’s avian ability. He discovered Kellogg’s voice could sustain a vibration of 14,000 Hertz and could reach levels of 40,000 Hertz – too high for human ears to hear. Normal human voices vibrate at about 4,000 Hertz.
Kellogg married a woman named Sarah in about 1911 and soon after the couple used his vaudeville profits to buy rustic property in the hills a few miles east of Morgan Hill. “Ever Ever Ranch,” he called his home.
“The name indicates that it was a place free of time,” Moreno explained the unusual designation. “He attributed these magical properties to it. It was a place forever independent of time.”
As Kellogg’s fame grew, he became an international sensation. He took his act to Europe. In London, he performed his bird songs for 20,000 people.
Also during his travels, Kellogg met Achilles in the South Pacific. According to Moreno, she was on a personal quest for a spiritual purpose in life. Somehow, she sensed Kellogg could help her find it. The millionairess soon after built her luxurious Fountain Oaks mansion in Morgan Hill to be near her beloved Nature Singer.
But despite the acclaim and applause and public adoration, Kellogg’s heart was set on his real life mission – making sure future generations could stand in awe under the magnificent redwoods. In his day, as they are now, these natural wonders were in danger of being cut down by lumber companies seeking financial gain in the groves.
Using his showmanship skills developed from years of treading the vaudeville stage, Kellogg determined to present to the American public in dramatic style the grandeur of the redwoods. Knowing it would be impractical to bring the entire U.S. population to California to these giants, he decided to put one of the trees on tour instead.
In the forest of Humboldt County, he found a redwood that lay fallen. Kellogg worked for three days with a 14-foot one-man saw to cut out a 22-foot, 36-ton section of the tree. He then spent the next three months using a ramrod to cut off six-inch sections of the timber to hallow it out into an 8-ton shell.
When he had completed this tedious task, Kellogg mounted the shell onto the chassis of a Nash Quad truck and drove his unique vehicle 300 miles south back to his Ever Ever Ranch in Morgan Hill. There, he added refinements such as beds, a table, a stove, a toilet, storage cabinets, electric lights and running water. He called his contraption his “Travel Log.” He’d invented the world’s first recreational vehicle.
Kellogg’s RV quickly became a national sensation. From 1917 to 1921, he drove it coast-to-coast four times, showing it off to people in big cities and small town throughout America. People stood drop-jawed as they witnessed first hand the gargantuan size of the tree. Many also felt outraged that these Goliaths were being commercially cut down without thought for their future appreciation. Masses of Americans joined Kellogg’s “Save the Redwood League” to help preserve the giants.
Kellogg’s “Travel Log” is now kept at the visitors center at Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Thanks to the work of Kellogg and other environmentally-minded men and women like him, many of California’s ancient redwood trees still stand.
Kellogg died in Morgan Hill on Sept. 5, 1949. Since then, he’s become a historical footnote largely forgotten by the public. That’s one reason Kim Moreno wrote “The Angel of Ever Ever.”
“I think the play takes today’s community, and today’s society and connects us back to a society in the late Victorian period which was extremely civilized, extremely cultured, extremely purposed-driven,” Moreno said. “People today want that same perspective.”
Moreno hopes to find a local theatrical production company that might be interested in producing his play. If anyone is interested in more details, e-mail him at mo******@*******nk.net.
Ultimately, Charles Kellogg’s lasting legacy is the “ever ever” preservation of the natural environment for our nation’s spiritual benefit. As South Valley’s famous Nature Singer once philosophically wrote: “The stars, the tides, the migrations of birds, the appearance of the herbs, the trees, the flowers are all on time, giving that sense of harmony felt, and rejoice in by all.”
