Little River is a tiny unincorporated coastal community in Mendocino County, California, sitting on a bluff above the mouth of the Little River roughly three miles south of the village of Mendocino and about ten miles south of Fort Bragg. State Route 1, the Shoreline Highway, passes directly through it, hugging the Pacific coastline that defines life here. The community takes its name from the small river that drains the redwood canyons to the east and empties into the Pacific at the town's edge. In the late nineteenth century, Little River was a working lumber port, its wharf and mill shipping redwood to market. When the primary timber stands were cut, the mill closed by 1893, the wharf and shipyard deteriorated, and the land gradually reverted to the wild state seen today. Much of that story is preserved at Van Damme State Park, which sits just south of the village center and holds some of the richest historical resources connected to the region's redwood lumber era. Today Little River is a quiet residential and visitor-serving hamlet rather than a commercial center. Its compact town center is famously contained within a single structure housing a grocery store, gas pumps, a post office, and a restaurant. The surrounding landscape alternates between windswept ocean bluffs, meadow, and dense coastal redwood forest. The village of Mendocino, three miles north, supplies galleries, shops, and fuller services, while Albion lies a few miles south across the Albion River. Little River suits people drawn to the slow pace of the Mendocino coast, whether as year-round residents, second-home owners, or innkeepers. It is a place defined less by growth than by preservation: the state park, the protected headlands, and a landscape that has recovered from its industrial chapter into one of the quietest stretches of the Northern California coast.