On August 22, 1891, a 17-year-old Lou Henry, the future First Lady of the United States, posed with a rifle on a donkey outside Richard E. Nickel’s general store in Acton. The photo, taken by Nickel himself, is now preserved in the National Archives, with its date confirmed by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. That summer, Lou Henry ...

On January 24, 1888, Richard E. Nickel, widely regarded as the “Father of Acton,” was officially appointed postmaster of the young settlement. Nickel had arrived in the area the year before, relocating the former Soledad Post Office from the small mining camp of Ravenna in Soledad Canyon to his newly built general store in Acton. At the time, Nickel, then ...