[Editor’s note: Dronkers’ Deep Web is a semi-regular feature in which KHUM’s Mike Dronkers brings you weird, uplifting, mundane and depraved minutiae from the hinterlands of local webz. 

Email your local Deep Web curios to mike@khum.com or Tweet them to @mikedronkers. -AG]

This installment of DDW is squarely focused on relatively recent history. 

So here’s a map of Humboldt Bay in 1852, allegedly the first (white) map of this fair area. Does that look mostly accurate to you?

Go Deep.

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Next up: look at these entitled hippies and their oversized ride. 

Go Deep (WARNING: Nix pix)

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We saved the best and ‘less grand’ for last.

You’ve definitely been in one of these terribly outdated ‘modern’ houses: uninsulated vaulted ceilings, drafty bedrooms, and enormous windows. 

But have you been in an awesomely outdated house? 

Go look at EurekaModern.com right now, and glue a picture of Don Draper to your monitor for proper perspective. 

Eureka Modern welcomes you to the site:

“Besides the overwhelming natural beauty of the area, Eureka is known by it architectural history, primarily the grand Victorian mansions built during the heyday of the local lumber industry.

Less grand homes and quaint cottages and bungalows built throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century exhibit a broad range of architectural diversity that is widely appreciated and been subject to many a restoration.  

This site is dedicated to recognizing the historical value of mid-century modern architecture in Humboldt County and creating a community committed to preserving it.”

So this whole site is lovingly dedicated to all things modern, from the dutch gutters to the light fixtures and doorbells.

But why? 

“Tim Wetzel and Mary Castanier moved to Eureka in 2001 looking for a change and hoping to find a vintage modern home, like the Eichler homes we knew in Orange and Santa Clara Counties.  

What we found were a surprising number of stylish homes dating from the 1950’s and 60’s. 

What we did not find, to our surprise, was any acknowledgement that the homes we sought were anything special, or for that matter even particularly desirable.”  

And you can’t talk about Humboldt architecture without mentioning Ernest Pierson. 

“Perhaps it was the very success of local builder-developers like  Ernest Pierson, who furnished the region with a steady supply of affordable modern homes in the post-war period, that makes them seem to many people to be too common to be regarded as anything special.  

Indeed there are entire tracts of Pierson-built homes throughout the region, but many of these serve as outstanding examples of affordable modern architecture— then and now.”

Go deep. 

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UPDATE: If you want to really get into Pierson mania, commenter Jay points out this Pierson Fan Club Facebook group.