Tag: history

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.

I've just finished a big push to add all of Fred Nietz' photos to the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection. If you remember, Fred posted a bunch of old photos to Flickr a couple of months ago, and I immediately started adding them to the site. All his photos can be seen on Flickr here. He had some great pictures of Carson City, some from the 30s 40s and 50s, but many of them from the 1980s, showing a side of town that is long gone, but that many of us can remember from fairly recent memory. It's fascinating to look through all these pictures, and to see that in just the course of 25 years most of the businesses lining Carson Street have changed. There are some constants, to be sure, but a lot of cases where the building has stayed the same, but the tenants are completely different.

So it took me two months, but I finally posted every one of Fred's photos to the WNHPC. It took a lot longer than it should because there were a lot of starts and stops along the way, and I just don't get to work on the site as much as I'd like to. But I really wanted to finish and get these pictures out there, so now it's done. Now I have to move on to all the other photo collections that are sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, waiting to go online. This is a huge project I've buried myself under; it seems like it's going to go on forever!

Anyway, here are some of the new additions. You can see them all at this link.

This was also cross-posted to the WNHPC blog.

The Appeal today has two articles online about Carson City's early years. Trent Dolan looks at excerpts from the Territorial Enterprise in the late 1850s, and Guy Rocha examines the myth of a stage coach robbery that supposedly happened near Carson City, even though no evidence could be found now or then.

The Appeal today has two articles online about Carson City's early years. Trent Dolan looks at the problems newspapers would have in the early days getting basic supplies. Rolls of paper would have to come over the mountains from Placerville, brought by stagecoach. When it snowed, nobody could get over the mountains so there was no paper. Emergency supplies would be brought by people on foot, carried on their backs.

The other article is a look at Carson City's Lone Mountain Cemetery, and some of the people that are buried there.