Here are the morning’s top stories on Monday, October 28, 2024…
- Should a California town change its name because of its association with a murderous settler? That’s the question at the heart of a ballot measure this election season, in Lake County. It’s a rural area about two hours drive north of Sacramento. Voters are being asked if the small town of Kelseyville should be renamed Konocti.
- Southern California’s largest Asian American advocacy group is training its poll monitors to keep an eye out for racist rhetoric and bullying.
- Californians will vote on ten statewide ballot propositions this fall. Among them is Proposition 2, which would let California borrow $10 billion through a state bond to pay for updates to school facilities.
Should Kelseyville Change Its Name? Lake County Voters Will Have A Say This November
One of the first things you’ll see along the roadside driving into the small town of Kelseyville is a big stone marker. It’s the site of the area’s first adobe home, and also where the settler Andrew Kelsey and his business partner Charles Stone are buried.
An inscription on the landmark’s plaque tells a hurried version of the story of the adobe home and the duo’s deaths. It says the home was built “by forced Indian labor, causing much resentment and culminating in murder by Indians of Stone and Kelsey in the fall of 1849.” It then said their remains are buried under the monument.
Citizens for Healing, or C4H is a group of locals who launched an effort in 2020 to change Kelseyvillle’s name to Konocti. They argue it takes its namesake from the settler Kelsey, whose violent history expands beyond the story told in the plaque. He had a history of murdering, raping and enslaving Pomo people, who are Indigenous to the area, when he lived there in the 1800s.
As conversations around a possible name change became locally divisive, the county’s board stalled on giving any input. They eventually decided to put the issue on the November ballot and give their recommendation after seeing the results.