Tag: carsonvalley

There was hail in Reno, and there was hail here in the Carson Valley.

A lot of it, too, more than we usually get.

Along with a pretty fierce downpour, like a summer thunderstorm. Kind of unusual to see this in October, but I ceased being surprised by the weather a long time ago. Even if I'm still perplexed enough to write about it.

Halloween is becoming a bigger deal every year in Carson City. The Ghost Walk itself has become a huge event over the last few years, and now the Visitor's Bureau is taking steps to make it even bigger by teaming up with their neighbor to the south, Douglas County. This year seems to be the inaugural year of the "Haunted Weekend", taking place October 20, 21 and 22.

For one price ($30), you can take part in four different ghostly events around the Carson and Eagle Valleys:

• October 20: Meet the ghosts of Gardnerville on the guided Haunted Ghost Walk. Meet at the Carson Valley Museum & Cultural Center. Tours depart hourly between 6:30-8:30 p.m.
• October 21 Day: The popular Carson City Kit Carson Trail Ghost Walk begins at 9 a.m. and departs every half-hour until 3 p.m. from Third & Carson Streets. This year's theme is Grave Concerns. Guided walking tours offer ghostly glimpses into the residents who made history here. There are two tours:
  • The Resurrection Tour features spirits appearing in: Brewery Arts Center, Esser Home, United Methodist Church, Brougher Bath House and Rinckel Mansion.
  • The Remembrance Tour features spirits appearing in: Stewart Nye Home, Edwards House, The Bliss Bungalow, and Bliss Mansion.
• October 21 Evening: Cemeteries hold special fascinations for many and make one wonder about those buried beneath. Wonder no more about these "past lives" as the ghosts of the historic Genoa Cemetery come to life between 6:30-8 p.m. Meet at the cemetery.
• October 22: Learn even more about Genoa's haunted sites on the Genoa Ghost Walk between 10:30-11:30 a.m. Meet at Genoa Courthouse Museum.

This seems to be a pretty excellent promotion, and a good demonstration of the two counties coming together to attract visitors. Of course you can buy tickets to each of these events separately as well. The Carson City Ghost Walk is $15, and each of the others is $5 apiece.

You can make reservations by calling (775)987-7410, or download the PDF form (80kb) and fax it in.

The Summer Concert Series is coming back to Minden Park this year, after a pretty successful run last year. This summer there are five concerts planned, all of them happening at the gazebo in Minden Park.

• May 26th: The Rip Tides
• June 30th: Mumbo Gumbo
• July 14th: Deja Blues
• July 28th: Stork Raving Mad
• August 25th: Jeff Jones Band

I'm especially excited about the Mumbo Gumbo concert. When I was younger I used to follow Mumbo Gumbo like some people follow the Dead. Well, I didn't have a van, but you get the idea. All the concerts start at 6:30pm, except on August 25 when it starts at 6:00. Bring a blanket, some lawn chairs, and a picnic basket, and settle in on the lawn for an evening of music.

The heavy equipment has been brought in and sagebrush has been cleared away. I don't know what they're going to build, but I know that work has started, and it's covering several acres.

This piece of land is located at the corner of Hwy 395 and 88 in Minden, across the street from Douglas High. The photo is looking east from Hwy 88, and you can see the new Arby's being built in the background. For years and years there was a sign on this lot saying that a Safeway surpermarket was coming; the Safeway was obviously never built. But now work has finally started, and I don't see any signs saying what it's going to be. So we'll have to keep an eye on this one.

Today I schlepped on down to the Carson City library with a couple of books I had to return. And after I dropped them in the bin, I wandered over to the Nevada section, as I usually do, to see if there was anything there that caught my eye. And indeed, when I was rifling through the shelves, I came across the book Remembrances of Centerville by Frieda Cordes Godecke from 1973. It’s a memoir of her time spent in the tiny little town of Centerville, a hundred years ago when it was actually a town and not just a bump in the middle of Hwy 88. And since the destruction of the Valley Bar was still fresh on my mind, I picked up the book to flip through the pages and see if the bar was mentioned at all. And indeed, right on the third page is a map of town, and the corner where the Valley Bar sat is marked “Saloon, later Cheese Factory”. I never knew there was such a thing as Centerville Cheese. I wonder if it was any good?

I went further into the book, reading Frieda’s stories of growing up in Centerville, vacationing at Lake Tahoe (it used to take all day to get there), walking to Waterloo to see her first moving picture show, and watching the first automobile drive through town. But it was page 25 that stopped me dead. For at the top of page 25, inside a decorative border, was this picture:

The caption says, “William Scheele in buggy in front of saloon. Cordes farm home in background.” The farm house where Frieda grew up is barely visible through the trees to the right, so that means that the building to the left was the town’s saloon (and later cheese shop, where Frieda says the cheese was quite good until the day they saw the cheesemaker letting his perspiration drip into the vat, after which they called it “Sweat Cheese”.) But there was something very familiar about the shape of that front porch; I realized I had just seen it yesterday. That saloon is the very same building that later, with a couple of additions, became the Valley Bar. That’s the same building that burned down on Sunday.

I’m trying to figure out when that photo might have been taken, but there’s no date on the photo. In fact there are very few dates throughout the entire book (Frieda was born in 1900, and married in 1921, so presumably all the stories take place in those two decades.) There is a Herman Scheele mentioned as the driver of the valley milk wagon, but I haven’t found anything about William Scheele (other than a 1916 patent) or what year he might have been driving his buggy through town. The Record Courier, in this article, mentions that the Valley Bar was “brought over from Virginia City in the early 1930s.” But the Valley Bar that we knew in the 21st century was much larger than the one in this picture. It looks like there had been two additions; one to the right, and one in the back. Was it one of those buildings that was brought down from VC and used to make the saloon bigger? Or is this a 30s-era photo?

What’s left of the Centerville Saloon, the “Pride of the West”. The addition to the right was completely destroyed, leaving only this original facade.

I guess it’s a moot point now. The bar has burned, and what’s left standing will probably be leveled soon. And so the story of yet another one of Nevada’s old buildings comes to an end. All I can do is put up these pictures, and try to keep it alive on the Web.

Later: I found a couple more newspaper articles on the fire, this one from the Record Courier that gives a little more info about the fire’s cause (electrical) and the history of the bar, and a blurb in the Las Vegas Review Journal that says the original saloon building was “built in Virginia City sometime in the 1850s or 1860s” (which would make it survivor of the 1875 fire?) “and moved to Centerville by 1900.” That timeline makes a little more sense than saying it was moved in the 1930s. But it also says the cheese shop closed in 1902, which means Frieda would have been eating her “Sweat Cheese” at age 2. Her memory was pretty sharp, but I doubt it was that good.

I did make it down to Centerville today to take some pictures of the Valley Bar. The damage is almost total; a couple of walls are standing, and the Men’s room is almost intact, but the rest of the bar is gone.

A small crew was out clearing away debris, sifting through the rubble for anything that could be saved. There wasn’t much. Slot machines were destroyed, TVs were melted, and the roof caved in on the pool table. But apparently the fridge was still intact, and there was still cold beer inside. So the work crew, which I believe was mostly made up of regular customers and friends of the owners, were able to have one last drink around the bar.

Looking from some angles, you could almost believe that the damage was minor. The fire department did a good job of saving as much of the building as they could. But the fire had a head start on them, and the building was just too old and flammable for them to have a chance. The northwest corner, shown below, was really the only part that wasn’t completely destroyed. But inside those solid walls, most everything is charred, and the parts that aren’t burnt have massive water damage.

But the front door still stands, and an American flag flies proudly over the porch. This is a rough day for a lot of people, but there’s always promise for the future. It seems like the Valley Bar was more about the people than the building; the number of folks hanging around offering support today proved that. So if the bar is rebuilt, it may not have the same charm, but it will still have the same heart.

For a bunch more pictures of the aftermath, check out the Flickr photo set I put together.

The old Valley Bar, on Hwy 88 in the Carson Valley, has burned down. According to the article, a fire started about 5am yesterday morning, and by the time firefighters arrived it was too late to save it. The roof collapsed soon after they got there, and although some of the walls are still standing, the building is pretty much a complete loss. The owners, who bought the place less than a year ago, are unsure yet if they’re going to rebuild.

Image from www.valleybar.com/wst_page6.html

The Valley Bar, at the corner of Hwy 88 and Centerville Road, was one of the last remnants of the town of Centerville, a little oasis of trees in the middle of the valley. Once an independent town along the road to California, Centerville declined when the advent of cars and paved roads made it only a ten-minute drive in to Gardnerville. All that’s left now are about a dozen houses, a few leaning barns and, until yesterday, the Valley Bar. It sounds like there has always been a bar at that particular corner, and the current building was brought down from Virginia City in the 1930s.

The bar was a familiar landmark along Hwy 88. It looked pretty rundown from the outside, with peeling paint and rusting equipment laying around, and at times the dozen or so motorcycles parked out front would be enough to keep a square like me away. But you could say that all that was part of its charm, and it was supposedly one of the friendliest places in the valley. Of all the times I drove by it, it was never empty. Even in a heavy snowstorm there would be one car that had plowed through the drifts, or a set of footprints leading up to the front door. Now that it’s gone it’s a big loss to the character of the valley, and even if they rebuild it it won’t be the same place.

I’m going to try to get down there myself to take some pictures of the aftermath. But if we have any Carson Valley readers with a camera, scoot down there and upload a few shots to the site! I’m always looking for contributions from others, and you’ll be doing your part as citizen journalists.

Update: I have pictures.

Okay, everyone reading this has to drive out to Johnson Lane tonight. No excuses, no shirking your duties. If you are in Northern Nevada, you need to hop in your car after sunset tonight and drive to the Carson Valley. If you are an expatriate living somewhere else, you need to hop on a plane and get here as soon as you can. If you’re in a hospital bed, get them to call an ambulance. Because out in Johnson Lane there is a Christmas light display that you’re not going to want to miss.

Last night we went out in search of awesome Christmas displays, and we spent the evening coming across display after display that were depressingly similar. Eveyone has the icicle lights, everyone has the wireframe reindeer, everyone has an inflatable Santa on the roof. After a couple of hours of this we decided to head home, and hit one last neighborhood on our way.

That’s when we had a revelation and realized what an awesome Christmas display truly could be.

Last year I wrote what I called “Radio Free Suburbia”, where I talked about how one of our neighbors was broadcasting Christmas songs over the radio with a low-wattage transmitter. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but because we didn’t actually spend a lot of time in front of their house, it wasn’t until this year that we realized we were only seeing half of the puzzle, and we were missing how cool it actually was. Last night we drove by again, and found out that this year they were once again broadcasting over the air. But this time we spent a little more time parked in the street looking at their house, and we began to notice something: the lights on their house and in their yard were blinking, like so many other houses we had seen that night. But instead of blinking in a random pattern, they seemed to be programmed, like they were putting on a show.. And as we sat there longer, with their radio station tuned in the background, our brains put all the pieces together: this light show was actually synchronized to the music! They had turned their entire yard into a stage, playing out this spectacle that must have taken weeks or months of programming.

Click to view actual video of the lights.

Well, we sat there, transfixed. Song after song came on the radio, each one of them carefully choreographed in the lights. Other cars pulled up to the house and shut their engines off. And before we knew if, maybe 20 minutes later, we had sat through the entire loop and the songs started to repeat. We drove away and looked at some other houses, but everything was a disappointment after that.

I was sitting there watching this show, and wondering how it was done, when at one point Wayne Kremer, the owner, came on the radio explaining how he had set it up. It uses a software called Light-O-Rama, which coordinates the music with several controller boxes placed around the property. There are ten boxes controlling 134 channels and over 50,000 lights! After getting home and going a little digging online, I found the same setup used at a few other houses. Carson Williams in Ohio did one, and you’ve also got the Plymouth Lights, the Lindsay Lights, and Wonderland Christmas that are all based on the same concept. But being able to see it live beats watching a grainy video any day.

Speaking of which, here’s a grainy video of the show! I uploaded one song to Ourmedia for everyone who can’t make it out to see the lights, or who wants to sample the show before they go.

If you are in the area and you do want to go visit, the lights are in the Johnson Lane area of Douglas County. Drive Hwy 395 to Stephanie Way, turn east on Stephanie and drive about a mile and a half to Saratoga Springs. Turn left into Saratoga Springs, then take the second right onto Chaparral Court. The lights are at the end of the cul-de-sac, on the left. The address is 1176 Chaparral Court (here’s a map). If you go check out the lights, post a comment letting everyone know what you think!

Update, 12/24: I just found out that the lights have their own official website, www.NevadaChristmas.com. It includes, among other things, a complete video of the entire 19-minute show. Awesome!

Tonight we moseyed on down to Minden Park to catch the first of the Concerts in the Park summer series that the Carson Valley Inn is putting on. The music this time was provided by the John Jorgenson Quintet, a rolicking good “hot jazz” combo that reminded me a lot of the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Three guitars, an upright bass, and a fiddle, playing swinging music that sounded like it came right out of the 30’s.

Minden Park, with a full crowd clustered around the gazebo.

They also played a couple of jazz standards, and a few French jazz songs. Luckily there were no words on those.

The John Jorgenson Quintet on stage. They even took the railing off to make the gazebo into a better venue.

In all they played two sets, about 45 minutes each. I overheard a couple of teenage girls talking about how good the music was, so for a bunch of old fogies playing a 70-year old set list, that’s the real seal of approval. Definitely a band to check out!

A lot of people turned out on a Friday night for the concert.

Folks brought their dogs...

...and more dogs...

...and even a talking bird!

The program for tonight’s presentation. Inside was one page about the band, and 14 pages of ads.

This Concerts in the Park series continues all summer, with four more shows to go:

• June 24th - Playa Papaya
• July 8th - Crazy Texas Gypsies
• July 29th - an old favorite of mine, Mumbo Gumbo!
• August 26th - Michael Powers Group

All shows are at 6:30pm. So if you ever find yourself in Minden on a Friday night, you know what to do!