Tag: history

No Safe Place is at it again with his Old Nevada series. This latest one is just a cool as always.

This is looking north from the roof of the St. Charles Hotel, up Carson Street towards the Capitol. You can see it used to be called the "Pony Hotel" back then, and the bar at the corner, soon to be home to the Firkin and Fox, was called the Mite As Well. All those buildings across the street have long since been demolished to build the Capitol Plaza, and planters and left turn lanes have been put down the middle of the street.

Read the whole article. There are even more pictures over there.

Excerpts from;
“With Curry’s Compliments: The story of Abraham Curry”
By Doris Cerveri 1990

Roots of Carson City and Downieville

With years of experience as a successful businessman, however, Curry was wise enough to realize that a mining community did not offer financial security, no matter how lively it seemed. Although he had had no mining experience, it is possible that he felt the same excitement and anticipation that hundreds of other individuals did, and was fascinated by the thought of getting rich quick. He was able, though, to observe first hand the disappointment and disillusionment of many men when a mine produced only surface gold or silver and subsequently became barren. People moved away from Red Dog after the mines were exhausted and nearly all the buildings, including the Odd Fellows Hall, were moved to nearby You Bet, which boomed by 1860. Three years later, You Bet and Red Dog were consolidated.

During Curry's stay in Red Dog he operated a ten-pin bowling alley and, on March 24, 1856, organized the first tribe of the Improved Order of Red Men in California. Meetings of the Red Men were held in the hayloft of a livery stable owned by the Brooklyn Lodge of the Odd Fellows. Curry and the other Red Men made their own regalia out of ground squirrel and fox skins, as there were no companies in the state at that time to supply their needs.

Curry reportedly also spent some time in Grass Valley, but this has not been authenticated. One thing is certain: Curry was not satisfied with either San Francisco, Red Dog or Grass Valley. Consequently, in 1857, he and Charles joined the hordes, of individuals then travelling a rough, narrow road to Downieville. Rich ore was being found everywhere at the new camp. It seemed like everyone had rich claims, and with so much money in circulation, businesses sprang up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. In 1851, the National Theatre was built in back of the town's Lower Plaza by a Mr. Morris. (This is mentioned particularly because it has been written in numerous articles that Curry built Downieville's first theatre. It has also been written that Curry constructed the first livery stable, but William W. White built and operated an express and livery stable in 1852 before Curry's arrival.)

The lure of gold did not entice Curry into mining during his short time in the various mining communities. Instead, during the period he was in Downieville, he undertook some construction work. On April 10, 1858, he contracted with the Mountain Shade Lodge, Masonic Order, to build a room or hall in the second story of a building then being erected by Curry (and known as Curry's Building) on the north side of the Lower Plaza in Downieville. It was to be ready by June 1, 1858, and the contract stipulated that after its completion Curry was to be paid $60 a month rent for two years.

Curry and his son owned real estate in Downieville which they later sold to finance their move to Nevada Territory, although there is no record of such transactions found at the Downieville courthouse. There is, however, no denying that it was in Downieville that fate took a definite hand in shaping Curry's future. It was there that he met the men who travelled with him when he first went to Nevada. Three of them, Benjamin F. Green, Francis ("Frank") Marion Proctor and John J. Musser, had lived in the Downieville area for several years before the Currys arrived. These men, and Curry, became active in early Carson City affairs and, although their interests were different, they remained friends throughout their lifetimes. Frank Green, Ben's brother, W. B. Hickok, and Capt.William T. Ferguson, also made the trip over the Sierra to Nevada with the others.

The first record of Benjamin F. Green in Downieville appears when he was a partner with Henry Purdy in the jewelry and watchmaking business. Green also transacted some county business and he served as county treasurer in 1857. Proctor, an attorney, married Green's daughter, Caroline, on December 31, 1857 in Downieville, but maintained a home in Forest City. Proctor was quite active in political affairs. In October, 1852, he served on the first grand jury for the court of sessions in Downieville and was county assessor in 1855. Musser, also an attorney, was district attorney of Sierra County in 1856-57.

In Downieville during 1857, there were rumors that an army was being sent from Washington to put down a possible Mormon rebellion in Salt Lake City because Brigham Young and the federal government had failed to agree on numerous issues. It was further rumored that Young had sent word to all his Mormon colonies: "Dispose of your property, come in one company, let us all keep together so that we can protect ourselves against all foes, red and white." Soon, stories of the Mormon exodus from western Utah Territory, the area that is now Nevada, were in all of the California newspapers and some of the men who hadn't found riches in the gold fields travelled to that region to try their luck. With most of the Mormons gone from it, western Utah offered unlimited possibilities for an opportunist with plans for a prosperous future.

Curry, his son Charles, Musser, Frank Green, Proctor, Hickok and Captain Ferguson left Downieville some time during the early spring of 1858, and, like others, went over the mountains to take a look at Utah Territory. They stopped at Steamboat Hot Springs, approximately twenty miles from present day Carson City, and then moved on to Washoe Lake, where they did some fishing. At Franktown, the men found a small Mormon settlement in which Orson Hyde had erected a crude "tabernacle." There was another small settlement in Eagle Valley. Curry's party did not stop there but went directly on to Genoa in Carson Valley.

There is no record of how long the group stayed in the area, but it was probably just a few days. At the time, Carson Valley had sufficient water, tall grass and fertile soil to provide a substantial living for any settler. Curry, Proctor, Green and Musser were favorably impressed, for when they went back to Downieville they made plans to return to Utah Territory.

CHAPTER 2
First Years in Nevada

In July, 1858, Curry and his son, Charles, accompanied by Musser, Proctor, and Frank and Benjamin F. Green, left Downieville and crossed the Sierra by stagecoach to Genoa. Musser, Proctor and Green's wives remained in Downieville; Curry's family was still in the East. A popular explanation of their settling in Eagle Valley is of Curry's offering $1,000 for a corner lot in Genoa where he planned to build a store. The property owners would not accept his offer so he and his companions left and travelled to the next valley to the north.

Eagle Valley was not as attractive as Carson Valley. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but scrubby stands of sagebrush and other desert flora. There were only a few patches of stunted grass and not a tree in sight. By 1857 so much livestock was driven through the valley by pioneers on their way to California that the supply of grass was depleted.

Before the Mormons left the area, a group of men including Joseph and Frank Barnard, George Follensbee, A. J. Rollins, and Frank and W. L. Hall, established a trading post in the valley called the King Ranch. When Frank Hall shot an eagle and mounted it over his cabin door the place became known as the Eagle Ranch; the valley subsequently also took the name Eagle. Situated in a circular basin, the ranch consisted of several thousand acres bounded by the Warm Springs (where the Nevada State Prison was later located), present day Minnesota Street and the mountains.

I had another thought today about the Nevada Appeal's website. I know this one is completely pie-in-the-sky, and it's never going to get done, but it would be so cool if it ever did happen, and it would definitely take advantage of the fact that space on the internet is basically limitless.

I was reading Doc Searls, and he wrote a post a couple of days ago with advice for newspapers. And most of the advice is tips on how they can make it through the transition to online with a minimum amount of fuss. But when I hit #2 on the list, I had a brainstorm. #2 reads "Start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website." And this is something the Nevada Appeal already does a tremendous job with. They have an archive section where you can pull up and read just about every article published in the paper over the last few years. It's a great tool, and I've used it many times.

But for some reason, when I was reading through Doc's thoughts on providing access to archives, most of which has to do with making the newspaper more visible to Google, and therefore increasing readership and advertising revenue, I started to think of a different kind of archive that the Nevada Appeal has, specifically the microfilm archives that stretch back over the last 140+ years of the paper's history. The paper started printing in May 1865, the year after statehood, as the Carson City Daily Appeal. And I'm pretty sure that archives exist for most of the paper's history; they have been dipped into constantly for the "Past Pages" column that was produced by Bill Dolan for nearly 60 years, and is still kept going by his son Trent and daughter Sue. But where are those archives kept? I don't know the answer; they're probably somewhere in the dusty stacks of the city or state library, available only to the few who have the time and inclination to go fetch them.

But why do they have to be hidden? Why does history always have to be locked away? My thinking is that the whole of the Nevada Appeal's archives, going all the way back to May 1865, should be available online. The old microfilms could be put up on the web as PDFs for everyone to read, and many of the more noteworthy stories from the past could be added to the paper's current archive system. This would be a tremendous resource for the community, and would do nothing but drive traffic to the paper's website. Which they could then use to raise their advertising rates, so everybody wins. And meanwhile the amount of armchair history that could be enabled by this move is immeasurable.

It's a project that I'd love to be a part of, if my plate wasn't already full with my job, family, new baby, and remodeling my house. I'm already trying to bootstrap a similar project that would make available online heaps of historic photos of the area, but I'm just stretched too thin to get anything finished anymore.

Seen roaming around on Phillips Street were these two chickens.

Phillips Street is one of the shortest in town, running only four blocks from Telegraph to Washington Streets, plus an additional wayward block between King and Musser. But its history has been so forgotten that most people don't know it's named after one of the first families of Carson City. Guy Rocha has done an excellent job of digging up the past and revealing who the Phillips family were and why they have a street named after them, short as it may be.

He doesn't explain the chickens, though.

The 2007 Historic Preservation Awards are here, and three winners have been announced. The Belknap House on Nevada Street, the Yerington House on Division, and the McKeen Car #22, which is currently under restoration at the Railroad Museum.

Read the Nevada Appeal article, look at the city's website to see how the Cactus Jack's sign just barely lost out, or go here to see the Appeal's video on the McKeen car from a couple of months ago.

All throughout the month of May the Historic Reno Preservation Society is offering walking tours of downtown Reno and other historic districts near downtown, as part of Nevada Archaeological Awareness and Historic Preservation Month. The Reno Gazette Journal has a full list of all the tours, ten in all, each costing ten dollars. There will also be nine more during July to celebrate ArtTown. A list of those is on the society's website.

Why are museums and historical societies so stingy with their photo collections? This is something I've always wondered. You've got an organization that's been created for the public good, like a museum, and they have this fantastic resource, like a collection of historic photos, that could easily be put on the web to enrich the community, but instead they hold onto it. They control access, they charge fees, they keep everything hidden and away from public view, and they only let these pictures be seen as special "exhibitions" that run for a limited time. Then the photos go back into the dark where nobody can see them except for the chosen few. Why do they do this?

The latest thing to prompt this question is an RGJ article on an exhibition at the Nevada Historical Society featuring photos from the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad over the Sierra. Sounds like a great exhibit:

Along with dozens of historic photos that track the building of the Central Pacific from Sacramento, across Nevada and into Utah where it met the westbound-building of the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, the exhibit includes maps of suggested routes for the railroad, artwork, artifacts from work on the railway and newspaper stories of the era.

Now, except for the artifacts part of that, this entire exhibit sounds like it could easily be put online. Grow your audience from hundreds to thousands, or hundreds of thousands. Instead of having it "run through Dec. 14" because you have limited space in your exhibition hall, put it online where it can be permanent. But do they do this? No. It's like they deliberately want to limit the reach of this exhibit, to share it with as few people as possible. They want the control, they like being the keepers. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

And it's not just this one exhibit. Museums all across the country have huge collections of photos and artwork that they could put online. Some of them do a pretty good job. Just search Google for historic photo collection and you'll get five million hits. But if you go in close and study the results, you'll see that these are only partial collections. Like they'll have a few dozen images online, and if you're lucky some kind of catalog of the rest. Our local museum, the Nevada State Museum here in Carson City, has none of this. Neither does the Nevada State Library and Archives. The afore-mentioned Nevada Historical Society has a website so out-of-date that it doesn't even mention this new Central Pacific exhibit. The only ones doing it right locally are the University of Nevada and their growing number of "Digital Collections". Maybe the other museums and libraries in the area need to catch a clue from them.

Some of the resistance might come from the fact that these photo collections are a revenue stream for museums and other organizations right now, and they don't want to cut that off. That's valid, but short-sighted. Are these collections being maintained for the good of the public, or as a way to raise money for the museum? And which of those two options is better for society? You can still charge for prints, anyway.

More resistance might come from them thinking the costs of putting the pictures online is too high. And that comes from not understanding the web. Most of the organizations I've found online that "get it" are using software called ContentDM, which from what I can tell looks like a very good CMS for publishing photos. The software isn't free, but I can't imagine it breaking a museum's budget. And if you don't want to shell out for a professional solution, find some volunteer or staff member that knows PHP and get them to write the thing. Or bring someone from the community that has the skills onto the project as a consultant. Photo galleries are not hard things to program; I've done it myself, so you know it's not difficult. And as far as hosting? Web hosting is cheap and getting cheaper every day. Maybe there are control freaks in the State IT department that balk at you running PHP or using outside hosting? Tell them to stuff it and remind them that you're their boss, not the other way around. Or even use Flickr and poach off of Yahoo!'s generosity.

The obstacles are there, but they're not insurmountable. More and more stuff is moving onto the web, the entire of human experience that can be transmitted digitally, text pictures and video, is moving onto the web. These museums, libraries, and historical societies need to get with it and realize that the transformation is happening. People don't want to have to visit the museum in order to visit the museum, you know? If they want to do it from home, if they want to do it from their office or from a coffee shop or from a hotel when they're on vacation, let them do it!

This is part of the motivation behind me wanting to build my own historical photo collection of Carson City and the surrounding areas, as a workaround for the state agencies that are dragging their feet. Some anonymous person out there has been great at submitting pictures to the Around Carson Photo Database, but one day soon I hope to start on a separate collection, a special site just for historic pictures, and dump in all the pictures I've gathered from all my different sources, and let you dump any pictures you might have, and maybe we can show them how to do it right and spur them to get off their butts to do it even better.

That's how the grassroots works. One blade at a time.

Someone's been awesomely posting old black and white historic photos of Carson City to the photo database this week. This is great stuff. I've seen most of these, but I haven't put any of them up online myself yet. And there's even a few in there that are new to me.

If you get some time, go over to the Photos page and check them out. This just spurs me on even more to get working on the Online Historic Photo Archive I've been wanting to build, where I would just take every old picture I've ever found of the area and dump them all online. It's something I really want to do, but the amount of work it would take to get there is daunting. Plus real life keeps getting in the way, Plus I've been in a massive creative slump lately (like you haven't noticed), so it's tough to take on a project this big. But I've found some really awesome V&T photos in the library, and that's wanted me to start up working on the Then And Now articles again, and now this anonymous person is doing some of the work for me, and it seems like maybe all the signs are there and I just need to get busy and get it done.

Never underestimate my capacity for procrastination, though. I've been too busy taking pictures of cows.