Tag: history

Crossposted from the WNHPC Blog.

I’ve had some new photos come into the WNHPC recently. All good stuff.

The St Charles for a few decades was known as the Travelers Hotel.

The McKeen Motor Car, which ran on the V&T Railroad, served about ten years time as a diner on the north side of town.

The Sweeney Building is one of Carson City’s oldest buildings.

I love the facade on the Ship Bar.

A few new additions to the WNHPC tonight. I really need to add photos more often. I have a backlog of hundreds of pictures waiting to go in.

Bliss Mansion

Robinson Street

State Capitol

White House Hotel

Brian Switek brings us the story of the Carson City Giant. In 1882 large footprints were discovered fossilized in the stone at the State Prison quarry. The discovery was publicized by H. W. Harkness of San Francisco, who said that the footprints were unidentifiable and undoubtedly came from a giant prehistoric man wearing a size 19 sandal. This of course drew much national attention, and scrutiny from other scientists revealed the prints to be very similar to those found elsewhere, that had been identified as a giant sloth. Doubtless a sloth had wandered through the springs that sprout up by the prison, and left his soft footprints in the mud, that later fossilized. The Californians were mostly satisfied with this explanation, and went home. But there are still some who believe that a bigfoot walked among us, many thousands of years ago.

The Nevada Appeal has two articles about the history of Carson City today. Sue Ballew looks at the story of Billie Lynch, a black man who was a personal messenger to President Lincoln, and was in Ford's Theater on the night he was shot. Abraham Curry later brought him to Carson City where he worked as a porter at the U.S. Mint on Carson Street. And Chris Bayer continues his story about Major Ormsby, from his moving to the new city of Carson to his death scarcely a year later.

The Nevada Appeal had a story yesterday by Chris Bayer, about the life of William Ormsby. Chris wrote the book "Profit, Plots and Lynching", and will be speaking at the Carson City Library on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

The paper also has a guide to some of the Sesquicentennial events happening August 16th in Carson City.

Crossposted from the WNHPC Blog:

From Hart Corbett comes this photo of Lucius Beebe, taken in 1949 by his father, William C. Corbett. The Corbetts are descendants of one of Carson City's pioneer families, and although they no longer live in town they still maintain ties to Carson.

Lucius Beebe here is standing in front of his private rail car, the "Gold Coast". In 1949 he was living in this car, parked under some cottonwoods in the V&T yards, while writing a book about the Virginia and Truckee Railroad. William and Hart Corbett had come to town Memorial Day weekend to ride a special V&T excursion train from Reno to Minden, and ran into Beebe while stopped at Carson City.

The Nevada Appeal had one article today, about Henry Mighels, who was the editor of the Carson Daily Appeal in 1865. That paper later evolved into the Nevada Appeal. Henry stayed at the helm of the Appeal until he died in September 1879, then his wife took over and kept it running.

The Nevada Appeal today has a front-page story on the earthquake readiness of several of the historic buildings around town. Many of the town's most massive buildings are made of stone, quarried from the state prison over a hundred years ago and put together with the best masonry techniques of the day. But stone buildings don't hold up well in earthquakes, and any of those buildings could have been brought down by a good shake. The Capitol Building, the Old State Printing Office, the Laxalt Building, and the State Museum. All were in danger of falling over with a big enough temblor.

But all of them have since been earthquake-proofed and reinforced, and that's what this article is about. Some of the buildings simply had steel braces and straps installed to hold the walls in place, so that in a quake the whole structure would move as one piece and not be shaken apart. Other buildings had steel rods drilled through their sandstone blocks as a way of reinforcing the structure. But the Capitol had the most drastic work done. In the late 1970s the whole building was gutted. Gutted right down to the stone walls and dirt floor. Then a new steel and concrete framework was built inside the stone, in essence a brand-new building inside the old shell. It was topped off with a fiberglass dome, all the original trim and moldings were put back in, and now we have a practically earthquake-proof Capitol. These photos, from the State Library's website, show the dramatic construction work being done.

I know it looks like overkill, but the alternative, bandied about in the 1950s and 60s, was to demolish the Capitol and replace it with post-war office buildings. So possibly they made the right choice.

Here are a couple of cool pictures that were donated to the WNHPC. They are of the Arlington Hotel, which used to stand in Carson City across the street from the Nugget. It was torn down in 1966; it's a parking lot now.

The Nevada Appeal had an article by Trent Dolan yesterday, highlighting some of the topics that newspapers covered in the early 1860s.