Tag: wnhpc

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.

Happy New Year, everyone. 2008 is upon us.

2008 is a fairly big year for Carson City. It was 150 years ago that a group of folks named Curry, Proctor, Musser, and Green came over the mountains from California looking to buy some land and start a town. The land they bought was the Eagle Valley, and the town they started was named after the nearby Carson River. So this year marks what some of us like to call the Sesquicentennial, but it's okay if you just want to say it's Carson City's 150th birthday.

There's a brain trust that's been formed around the 150th, tasked with the job of strategizing ways to commemorate the occasion. Me, I'm not so much for the strategizing. My way is more to stumble in blindly, blazing a fresh trail with code like us web wonks are wont to do. And so it's in the spirit of stumbling blindly that I today unveil two new websites in the Around Carson family, both geared to the Sesquicentennial and the history of Carson City. They're both a little undercooked, and I might have liked a bit more time to polish them up before releasing them to the public, but the symbolism of being able to launch them on January 1 was too much to pass up. So here they are, with all their rough edges intact. But it's okay. I know we're friends. I know you won't judge on first impressions, but rather look to the potential of the sites and admire them for the ambitious promise that they hold. Right?

Okay, so here are the two sites. They both revolve around telling the history of Carson City, coming from two different angles: pictures and words. First up, with pictures, is the inelegantly-named Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection. It can be found at wnhpc.aroundcarson.com. It is a photo gallery specializing in historic photos of the Carson area. Carson City, Virginia City, Carson Valley, Lake Tahoe, all the usual suspects that are included underneath Around Carson's banner.

The WNHPC (as I've affectionately dubbed it) is kind of slim right now, but that's because I've been frantically programming behind the scenes to meet my little deadline here. That's right, just like Around Carson, the WNHPC was coded from scratch with my own two hands. I'm responsible for all the programming on the site, so I'm responsible for any hiccups, errors, or general funny business you might encounter during your visits.

The idea of an online photo gallery is one I've been kicking around for a long time, and indeed I started the programming on the WNHPC last summer. After quite a few stalls and lulls in progress, it's finally at a point where I'm proud enough to show it off, and ready to start adding pictures from my collection. I've built in quite a few sharing features, and the capacity to view larger sizes of the photo if they're available. I tried to build this into the kind of historic photo collection I've always wanted to see, and I'm just getting started so I'm sure there will be more changes to come.

Go check it out.

The second site, committed to attacking history with words, is Carsonpedia (www.carsonpedia.com). This is the online encyclopedia for Carson City. If you're familiar with Wikipedia, you'll feel right at home at Carsonpedia. In fact, you may start to feel like I ripped them off. And that is because I did. The software that runs Wikipedia is available to everyone for general use, so I snagged a copy and got it running underneath the site. Yes, it's a website that I didn't do all the programming on. Go figure.

The idea behind Carsonpedia is to build up a general storehouse of knowledge regarding Carson City and its neighbors. Much like Wikipedia, I intend to write individual entries for every town, building, person of note, and historical event, tying them all together in a web of hyperlinks. Right now the content there is pretty scant. This idea came to me in a haze as I was drifting off to sleep a couple of weeks ago, and I've barely had time to flesh it out to something that's truly useful yet. But, of course, we're all friends here, so remember that you're evaluating based on its potential. The promise of the site. Some of the articles I do have written are ones on Carson City, Abraham Curry, Mark Twain, and Major William Ormsby. That only leaves about 10,000 articles left to be written. The major selling point of the software I'm using, though, is that any of you, the esteemed audience, can jump in to create and embellish articles yourself, making this a true community encyclopedia. My goal is to surpass the Online Nevada Encyclopedia in both size and usefulness by the end of the year. Think we can make it?

Oh well, keep dreaming. Go check out the site.

And happy 150th, Carson City.