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Living Memories
a Memoir by Nellie Gail Moulton
Edited by Scott T. Barnes

Nellie Gail Moulton lived through cyclones, sod houses, and the birth of modern California. 

Her memoir Living Memories, written in 1970 at age 92, nearly vanished into family lore before her great-grandson discovered the manuscript 49 years later in a musty closet and published it. The result reads like sitting with your most interesting great-aunt as she spills family secrets over coffee.

Editor Scott T. Barnes has done admirable work preserving his great-grandmother's authentic voice while adding helpful footnotes and period photographs that illuminate her world. Born in 1878 in Kansas, Moulton survived a devastating tornado as an infant, then spent her childhood moving from failed homestead to failed homestead. 

She later became a schoolteacher, artist, and eventually the wife of a prominent California rancher. Her artistic career included studying en plein air painting with California masters like Anna Hills and William Wendt. Moulton details the rigors of pioneer life, describing her mother making soap from grease and ashes and her father building a sod house on government land. Rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, and money worries constantly lurk. 

When the family's Kansas store closes—after someone steals the town's water pump—they head west in a covered wagon. These aren't romantic frontier tales: They're raw, messy, and filled with inconveniences that make readers thankful for modern amenities.

The writing can feel stiff, but it’s honest and full of quiet determination. Moulton offers small but telling details about her mother: "I can still vividly picture...her head bent in great concentration, pouring [sic] through her precious book, her own private medical advisor, referring to it constantly." And she readily pokes fun at herself—as when a fellow art student says the rock she painted looks like "a pretty good-looking potato."

While the memoir drags at times—weighed down by details like train schedules and distant relatives—Moulton's historical insights make for a valuable social history, opening a window onto a California that's still finding its shape today.

BlueInk Heads-Up: Orange County libraries will find this a worthy addition to their shelves. The book offers rich details on early ranch life, historic property development, and includes valuable period photographs. Genealogy researchers will benefit greatly from the thorough family documentation woven throughout.

Also available in paperback and ebook.

blueink Review

Nellie Gail Moulton crossed Kansas in a covered wagon, became a school teacher and principal in Washington state, lived a fairy tale romance, managed a 22,000-acre ranch in Orange County, California, and studied en plein aire art with such greats as William Wendt, Edgar Payne, and Ana Hills. She also founded the Laguna College of Art and Design and the Laguna Playhouse. Truly a Renaissance woman, Nellie tells her life story in evocative yet approachable language. Illustrated by over 100 photographs, the memoir’s many footnotes and end notes allow more detailed study.

Reviews

This enthralling historical timepiece by Moulton—rescued from obscurity and edited by her great-grandson, Scott Barnes—preserves the legacy of a “true pioneer,” a woman whose adventures included trundling across the plains in a covered wagon and spanned decades of revolution, daring ventures, and lasting human connection. Moulton herself explains the simmering power of what she calls “living memories,” those profound recollections stirred by scents, sounds, and faded images, as she revels in a life lived to its fullest: “As a little girl,” she writes, “I crossed the Midwestern plains in a covered wagon. Last year, watching a thing called television, I witnessed man’s first step on the surface of the moon.”

Moulton’s prose is evocative, summoning the creaking of wagon wheels in her childhood alongside the clamoring streets of Kyoto, Japan, one of the many international destinations she traveled to as an adult. Her escapades delve into her life as a teacher, principal, ranch manager, world excursionist, and artist, though not all moments captured here are sunny days and brightly starred nights. Surviving a Kansas cyclone at age seven, coping with the death of her husband, and the harshness of homesteading are just a handful of the precarious situations Moulton finds herself in.

Barnes includes a wealth of preserved photographs—many that Moulton herself took—in addition to correspondence, telegraphs, maps with wagon trails marked, sketches, and snippets from the Moulton Museum collection that bring the writing to life. The memoir closes with Moulton’s “Flight Journal,” detailing her most memorable travels, from childhood train trips to see her grandparents to her honeymoon in Hawaii. Her experiences of astounding historical events—women winning the right to vote, the first time she witnessed electricity—echo in her own accomplishments, such as her work with the Laguna Beach Art Association. The result is a riveting memoir from a vibrant, artistically talented woman—“one of the founders of the Southern California we know today.”

Takeaway: Riveting historical legacy from the perspective of a gifted pioneer.

Comparable Titles: Sarah Raymond Herndon’s Days on the Road, Gertrude Beasley’s My First Thirty Years.

Production grades

Cover: B+

Design and typography: A

Illustrations: A

Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A

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