This home was located at the corner of Stewart and Proctor Streets, built by 1935 by Edward Charles Marriage. This view shows it in 1947. Back then this part of town was very different, it was a residential neighborhood. Even though the railroad ran down the middle of Stewart Street (this photo was probably taken very near the tracks), the Capitol Building was just south of here (you can see the dome in the photo above), and this had been the site of several hay and stable yards in the 1800s (including Elrod & Keyser’s Yard that we looked at a few weeks ago). Houses had been built here in the early 20th century, and established a nice residential neighborhood right on the outskirts of downtown.
Edward Marriage was the state librarian from 1935 until his death in 1950. His son Charles Marriage owned an insurance company, which in later years was located at Musser and Stewart, right behind the house. And his grandson Alan Marriage lived in the house until 2002, watching all the other houses in the neighborhood be torn down one by one. By the turn of the century, this was no longer a residential neighborhood. It had become a sea of parking lots, used for State workers and Nugget Casino patrons. The Marriage home was one of the last houses remaining west of Stewart Street. The train tracks had been pulled up decades before, and Stewart was a 4-lane road used to bypass traffic downtown.
These changes prompted Alan Marriage, one of the last holdouts, to move out of the neighborhood. But he didn’t let the house be demolished like his neighbors. When he moved he took the house with him. In the Spring of 2002 the house was moved to Boyle Street in south Carson. Marriage admitted it was an expensive and difficult process, but he did it for sentimental and preservation reasons. Nowadays the former site of the house is a parking lot like all the others. Behind it the building that used to house Chas B. Marriage Insurance still stands, recently the home of Mangia Tutto Italian Restaurant before they moved to Mound House.
The house itself still stands on Boyle Street, with an addition in the back. Alan Marriage died a couple of years ago, but he got to live another two decades in his family home after saving it.
The house being moved in April 2002.
Alan Marriage photographed in front of the house, preparing for the move. Alan contributed many of his photos to the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection.
