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.
And here’s another Downtoner postcard that was added to the collection a little while ago. This one is a daytime shot.
I’ve had some more new photos come in 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.
From Hart Corbett comes this photo of Lucius Beebe, taken in 1949 by his father, William C. Corbett. The Corbetts are descendants of one of Carson City’s pioneer families, and although they no longer live in town they still maintain ties to Carson.
Lucius Beebe here is standing in front of his private rail car, the “Gold Coast”. In 1949 he was living in this car, parked under some cottonwoods in the V&T yards, while writing a book about the Virginia and Truckee Railroad. William and Hart Corbett had come to town Memorial Day weekend to ride a special V&T excursion train from Reno to Minden, and ran into Beebe while stopped at Carson City.
I’ve just finished a big push to add all of Fred Nietz’ photos to the WNHPC. If you remember, Fred posted a bunch of old photos to Flickr a couple of months ago, and I immediately started adding them to the site. All his photos can be seen on Flickr here. He had some great pictures of Carson City, some from the 30s 40s and 50s, but many of them from the 1980s, showing a side of town that is long gone, but that many of us can remember from fairly recent memory. It’s fascinating to look through all these pictures, and to see that in just the course of 25 years most of the businesses lining Carson Street have changed. There are some constants, to be sure, but a lot of cases where the building has stayed the same, but the tenants are completely different.
So it took me two months, but I finally posted every one of Fred’s photos to the WNHPC. It took a lot longer than it should because there were a lot of starts and stops along the way, and I just don’t get to work on the site as much as I’d like to. But I really wanted to finish and get these pictures out there, so now it’s done. Now I have to move on to all the other photo collections that are sitting on the shelf, collecting dust, waiting to go online. This is a huge project I’ve buried myself under; it seems like it’s going to go on forever!
Anyway, here are some of the new additions. You can see them all at this link.
I posted a bunch of pictures yesterday of the V&T railroad bridge across the Truckee River, in downtown Reno. This bridge was first built in 1872 when the line was extended from Carson to Reno. In all, three different bridges spanned the river. First there was a wooden bridge, which can be seen at the far right of this photo:
Soon the wooden bridge was replaced with this boxy bridge:
Then in 1896 the final bridge was installed:
The bridge was removed after the line was abandoned in 1950.
All the photos can be found at tag:vtrenobridge.
I posted quite a few pictures yesterday of the V&T enginehouse in Reno. This single-stall enginehouse was right near the Truckee River, along the V&T mainline, and had a turntable and a water tank in the vicinity.
The enginehouse was built in the late 1800s, probably soon after the branch line to Reno was built in 1872.
The enginehouse burned on May 1, 1950, with Engine #26 inside. There was only one month left before abandonment of the line
All the photos can be found at tag:vtrenoenginehouse
On May 1, 1950, V&T Engine #26 finished its daily run from Reno to Carson City and Minden and back, and was eased backwards into the Reno enginehouse near the banks of the Truckee River. The crew went through their normal routine of shutting her down, and headed home to rest up for the next day’s run. The V&T was in its last days, and the line was scheduled to be shut down at the end of the month. #26 only had a few more weeks service ahead of her before she was to be put out to pasture and, most likely, dismantled for scrap. The best she could hope for, probably, would be to be placed in a park or at the state museum, on display as one of the few remaining relics of the glory days of the Virginia and Truckee. No matter what, her days of active service were almost over.
Half an hour after the doors of the old wooden enginehouse were locked, a fire alarm went up on the east side of Reno. Firefighters arrived to find the enginehouse engulfed in flames, with Engine 26 still stowed away inside. Some glowing ember or spark from the engine must have made its way into some flammable material left around the shop, and ignited the blaze. Firefighters did their best, but it was too late. The enginehouse was completely destroyed, and the engine reduced to a charred pile of scrap. Sentimentalists surmised that Engine 26, knowing of her fate, decided to go out in the most spectacular way possible.
Photographer Bill Beatty had taken pictures of the engine being put away for the night, so he was still close by and able to come back and take this dramatic photo.
I added some code today to bring up a list of all the photographers featured on the site. Many of the photos come in with no information about who took them, but quite a few do have the name of the photographer listed. Now there is one handy page that lists all the photographers that have been identified, and shows how many of their pictures are in the collection. If you click on their name, it takes you to another page where you can browse through all of their photos. Just another feature I’ve wanted since the beginning and finally got around to building.
I wanted to single this photo out because it’s just so great.
Fred Nietz added a bunch of really interesting photos to Flickr last week, all of them Carson history pictures. Some of them were from the 30s through 50s, but most of them were taken in the 1980s, making them an interesting study on “near history”. I wrote about this on Around Carson earlier.
So of course with a stash of pictures this rich and this interesting, I couldn’t just leave them alone. I had to intercept them for the WNHPC as well. So I’ve been working, slowly as usual, to add these pictures into the collection and write descriptions for them. He posted a total of 57 pictures, and said he has more, so you’ll see them trickling in if you keep your eye on the All Photos page. Here are a few samples from this great collection.
