Tag: history

Gardnerville

I have to give a big public shoutout and thanks to Mark Englebretson. Mark is a postcard and casino memorabilia collector who lives in Wyoming. But he's fascinated with the history of Nevada casinos, and he runs the site nevadacasinoashtrays.org. There he displays his large collection of, yes, casino ashtrays, but also reveals photos and history tidbits for the casinos the ashtrays came from.

Fallon

Some time ago I noticed that there were a lot of good postcard photos of Carson City floating around, and I was seeing Mark's name next to them. So I got it in my head to contact Mark, see if he'd be willing to contribute a few of his postcards to the WNHPC and help build the collection.

Eureka

Mark's response was pretty enthusiastic, and in fact instead of singling out his Carson City photos he said that he would just send his whole "Nevada file," just to make things easier for him. I thought that sounded like a good idea. Because I'd get a whole lot of Vegas postcards that I could never use in the WNHPC, but they'd be fun to look at anyway.

Ely

So anyway his disc arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and I popped it in the computer to look at the pictures. It turned out that there were over 1,500 postcards on this disc, an absolute treasure trove of historic photos of Nevada casinos, bars, and downtowns. Yes there are a lot of photos of Vegas (around 500), but there are also entries for just about every little town in the state, great stuff that I've never seen before. All of the photos accompanying this post are part of what he gave me.

Battle Mountain

So now I have all these pictures, and it's kind of a daunting task to organize them and add them to the WNHPC. But they'll all get there eventually. This stuff is too good to keep secret. And the rest might end up on Flickr or somewhere.

And above all, a big thanks to Mark for sharing in the first place!

I found this postcard on eBay. It shows V&T engine #5 sitting at the Carson City Depot in the late 1940s, with a sparkling white C Hill visible in the background.

I need to give a big thanks to Gary, who contributed a bunch of photos to the WNHPC last week. His photos were all of the V&T Engine House and Shops, and you can see them at tag:vtshops. Some of them came from the Library of Congress HABS collection that I had seen before, but there were a few that were new to me too.

It's some great stuff, so thanks to Gary. And remember, if you have any photos you want to contribute to the collection, and you want to get a shout-out too, just e-mail me!

I have a new post on the WNHPC Blog about the V&T Shops that used to sit in Carson City.

In part of the Lawrence & Houseworth collection I came across these photos, and they jumped right out at me.

This fellow is Nick of the Woods. It looks like a goblin that's been encased in a tree, but really it's just a super-weird knot sticking out of the trunk.

Nick of the Woods apparently was quite a tourist attraction in his day. He was located near Yank's Station at Lake Tahoe, roughly in the present-day town of Meyers. In these pictures he's collected quite a crowd. I can imagine the proprietors of the station telling all the travelers who stopped by to go round back and see old Nick. It certainly would be a fascinating diversion in the middle of your long trip, and anything beats climbing back on that horse or getting back in the wagon.

These photos are roughly 145 years old, so I daresay Nick isn't around anymore. He was probably felled either by beetles, or fire (maybe the 1938 fire that burned Yank's Station), or the woodcutter's axe. And if, by some stretch of man and nature, this tree still does exist up in the forest of Meyers, he's probably grown out beyond all recognition. It's too bad too, because we really don't have a lot of weird stuff like this around here, and it would be good to have a place to take out-of-towners to give them a laugh.

So I started another blog. At least this one is kind of an offshoot of an existing site, not another entirely new website. It's the blog of the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection, the WNHPC Blog. I hope to use it to write about building the collections of the WNHPC, and to highlight interesting photos out of the collection. And of course I'll be putting really interesting photos here too, but I'm hoping to make that a place where I can do all photos all the time without it getting overwhelming. You can follow the blog, or subscribe to its feed.

I have one big post up already, about a major addition I just made to the site. Today I added the Lawrence & Houseworth collection, or at least a part of it. The L&H is a collection of views of California and Nevada during the mid 1860s, about 1,500 in all. I was sifting through the collection and found a sequence of 118 shots that chronicle an expedition from Placerville to Lake Tahoe and Virginia City. The photographer made several stops along the way (what is a three-hour drive for us probably took them a week or two by wagon) and took tourist photos of the interesting sights from the trip. Then they reached Virginia City and got to business photographing main street and the mines. It's a fantastic sequence, and I just had to put up the whole thing. To see it, start here and click on the Next button at the bottom.

There was one set of photos that was so funny I had to give them their own post.

The Timeline History of Carson City is a new little site built by FoopsDesign.com out of Reno. It's still pretty sparse, but then again so are most of my sites. And it's based on a cool DHTML app from MIT, so it's all full of scrolly goodness. But looking at the data file, you can see there's no point scrolling very far. It'll be interesting if they keep up with it, though.

These grim portraits have come forth from time immemorial to burn a hole into your soul. Look into their eyes. You are getting sleepy.

Kit Carson, who Carson City was named for.

Abe Curry, founder of Carson City.

William Ormsby, who built the Ormsby House.

Frank Proctor, co-founder of Carson City.

J.J. Musser, co-founder of Carson City.

James Nye, first governor of Nevada Territory.

William Stewart, first U.S. Senator from Nevada.

From the Nevada Appeal, April 15, 2004:

The mention of Kelly O'Keefe brings an instant, sort of lop-sided grin and a chuckle to the faces of old-time Carsonites. The headline on a yellowed news clipping on the wall in the Old Globe remembers him as "The One, The Only, The Inimitable Kelly O'Keefe."
...
O'Keefe was the town drunk whom all seemed to love and care for.

Guy Farmer, a member of The Associated Press' Capitol corps of reporters in the early 1960s, remembers him well.

"There's lots of great rumors about Kelly," he said. "Some said he was a jockey, a miner ... what he really was was a regular at the old Old Globe when it was across from the Nugget.

"He was a great town character. One of the jobs the guys in the press corps had in the '60s, when the press room was adjacent to the Assembly Chambers in the Capitol, was to look in and see if Kelly was asleep, passed out, on the rugs.

"He was treated as the lovable town drunk. People looked after him. He just reminds me of old times in Carson. He was a fixture."
...
O'Keefe, who was born James Benedict O'Keefe on Nov. 22, 1898, near Virginia City, died of natural causes in Carson City on Jan. 18, 1973, at the age of 74.

I haven't been as active on Carsonpedia as I had hoped. I've only written a few articles there since I launched the site on the First. Of course, I completely expected that this would happen, since I am a confirmed procrastinator, but I had hoped to be able to prove myself wrong.

Oh well, there's no point in complaining about it. Got to just keep plugging away. And the few articles I have written are ones that kind of represent the vision I have of Carsonpedia, to become an encyclopedic reference of Western Nevada, and especially a reference for things that aren't already heavily referenced elsewhere. I just posted what I hope is one of the most complete articles about the International Hotel in Virginia City to be found online, and it's skyrocketing up the charts at Google to #26. (Hey, give the site some time to build PageRank.)

I also made a page about the Great Fire of 1875 (so I was on a Virginia City kick), and actually had other contributors create pages about the Laxalt Building, U.S. Mint, and Blasdel Building. So, it's not like the site is dead. It's just growing slowly.

Something I started today is wildly ambitious, which probably means it won't be completed for five years, if ever. But I started a page for the Nevada State Historical Markers. You know, those little blue signs you see all over town. There are 266 of them in the state, and I want to get pages for all of them up on the site, with pictures of the sign and the full text. It's an idea I've been kicking around for a couple of years, originally planned as a section on Around Carson. But ideas like this are perfectly suited for Carsonpedia, so I've shifted it over there. Posting the text is the easy part; the State Historic Preservation Office already has a website which lists the full text of every marker out there, so it's a matter of copy and paste. But the photos will be more interesting. A lot of the markers are right here in town, so it would be easy in a couple of hours to jump around town and knock them all out in one day. But some of them are quite remote, on the many backroads of the Nevada desert. Getting those would be quite a project.

And that's where the collaborative nature of something like Carsonpedia comes into play. Between all of us reading this, we make up an army of photographers that could descend on the desert to photograph these signs. And it would still be a big effort, but each of us would only have to play a small part.

I know it's a tiny insignificant little thing, cataloging all the historical markers. But it's the little things like this that people stumble across in their surfing, and it makes them happy, if only for a little bit. Or it teaches them something. Or it lets them travel someplace they could never travel on their own.

Every day when I go to bed, I try to ask myself, "How did you make the internet better today?" And with something like Carsonpedia, I feel like I'm doing it, little by little. Even if I'm procrastinating.