Tag: wnhpc

The Viewliner Ltd. blog uses a few photos from my Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection in a post called "Around Nevada".

Crossposted from WNHPC.

This view from high above Carson City shows most of downtown, with the Capitol Building at the center. There's much about this photo that has changed in the 40-50 years since it was taken. To the south (right) of the Capitol, the whole Capitol Plaza and Legislature Building have not been constructed yet. Instead there is still a sprawl of scattered houses and commercial buildings, along with the Nye state office building. The brick buildings right across 2nd Street from the Capitol date back to the 1860s, when Carson City was just a few years old.

To the north of the Capitol, you can still see the Senator Cafe standing at the corner of Carson and Musser.

Looking out to the east of town, the last street is Harbin Ave, and beyond that is nothing but empty pasture. Also notice how none of the streets, like Roop and Stewart, go all the way north to connect with William Street (Hwy 50). That's because that empty area used to be the V&T Railroad yards. The tracks were torn up, but the land hadn't started to be developed yet.

This was a simpler time for Carson City, but also this shows Carson right at the precipice of the explosive growth that occurred in the mid 20th century. In about 20 years time, Carson City went from a small town clustered around the Capitol to a sprawling town that filled up the Eagle Valley in every direction. In this photo we were right at the edge.

New at the WNHPC Blog today: Churches.

Crossposted from the WNHPC Blog.

With the recent news that the Downtowner Motor Inn in Carson City may have new owners soon, Joe Childs was good enough to send in a scan of another old postcard of the motel. This one is dated 1969, and shows the motel when it was only seven years old.

This dusk shot almost makes the place seem inviting. The glow of the sign and the porch lights, as well as the Best Western crown, seem to have pulled in a lot of customers. Joe scanned the back of this one too, showing the message from “Poppy” to Miss Kristen Hendershot of Orange, Calif.

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

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!

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.