We arrived home last night at just a bit after 10:00 p.m. We drove (I should say, Clare drove, I rode shotgun!) all the way from Lee Vining, California, where we had spent Sunday and Monday nights at the
Mono Vista RV Park. Having driven from Dayton, Nevada, on Sunday down U.S. 395 and experienced some rather harrowing curves AND high winds, Clare decided that we'd take a less stressful (but not as scenic) route home through Hawthorne, Nevada, over to Fallon and then onto I-80 east. It turned out that it was not only less stressful but shorter by about 1/2 hour which, when one is traveling across Nevada, shorter is better!
But, this post is about our day in Virginia City, Nevada, the "legendary Nevada mining town, at the heart of the Comstock Lode." Years ago (back in the late 50's) our family vacationed in the Eastern Sierras at
Silver Lake for two weeks each summer and we had occasion to visit Virginia City (and Carson City). Well, the main street, "C" Street buildings look very much the same as I remember but the shoulder-to-shoulder tourists is something I don't remember! That aside, it was fun to meander down the boardwalks and snapping photos of, most notably, the saloons, that I remembered from those visits nearly 60 years ago.
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| Tread by many feet since the 1860's. |
We had come into the city from the southeast, again over Geiger Grade (not the truck route we had taken Friday but the route through
Gold Hill and
Silver City) in the car this time . . . we thanked our lucky stars that we hadn't driven the motor home this way as it has a 15% grade and is very curvy and narrow. I mention this because the first thing we visited was the prominent
Fourth Ward School House at the south end of town, the lovingly restored last-one-standing schoolhouse museum in Virginia City. It is bigger than the courthouse (Virginia City being the seat of Storey County, Nevada) and is interesting in that it tells the story of the real West in its interpretive center, " A Comstock Lesson." Here are a few photos we took on our "field trip:"
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This is a view of the south side of this imposing four-story schoolhouse. From where I was standing, it was difficult to get it all in!
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The "Comstock Lesson" interpretive center is housed in the first floor front left classroom and was truly interesting; it took us most of the time to look at all the "lessons" here which described the history and development of the great Comstock silver mining operations that made this area so rich.
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Of course, I had to take a photo of the seamstress's display. It was quite interesting that one of the seamstresses of the time wrote that the women of Virginia City were very fashion-conscious and took opulence to the extreme in some cases. Not only were the upper classes dressed to the hilt but middle class women dressed their families in unusual finery.
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The changing gallery on the first floor houses examples of mining the Comstock Lode as well as the various ores found there. It also had pictures of Virginia City and surrounding country then and now; interestingly, nature has reclaimed many of the abandoned mines to the extent that there are barely any clues to their existence. The first floor also had the Alumni Room, displaying class photos, histories, and family trees of Fourth Ward School students from when it opened in 1876 to the last senior class graduated in 1936. Here is a photo of the Historic Classroom Exhibit, also on the first floor:
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| These are original desks and they do show the wear of many students over the years. There has been meticulous attention paid to every detail of what the classrooms looked like during the years the school was in operation. |
This was a fun riddle . . . can you name the birds?
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| Write the answer in the comments section at the end of my post, if you want! |
We went on up to the second floor and took in the Printing and Mark Twain Exhibit (of course, Mark Twain was famous as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise from 1861 to 1864 and his book,
Roughing It contains vivid antidotes of his time there. The school had its own printing operation and the "Senior Dynamo" was published and printed monthly by the Virginia City High School which was in the Fourth Ward School. We liked this little ditty in a souvenir copy of the paper:
FORGET IT, by Harriett Gladding, Class of 1922
Forget the troubles of this life;
Forget the struggle and the strife,
Forget the scandal you have heard,
Forget the spoken unkind word.
Forget the fights and blackened eyes,
Forget the gossips, truths and lies,
Forget the bills you have to pay,
Forget the things the papers say,
Forget the first and only kiss,
Forgetting brings you untold bliss,
Forget most things that have gone by,
But DON'T forget Virginia High.
It seems appropriate for this election year!
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| The stairway up to the Second Floor. The treads are certainly worn down! |
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| Reading Roughing It in the Printing and Mark Twain Exhibit classroom. Each of the desks here had a copy of one of Mark Twain's books. The back of the classroom (behind me) has the printing set up including many vintage typewriters. |
Since the school had grades K through 12, the desks were full size and I fit in them comfortably!
The third and fourth floors are off limits to the public but at least the third floor has been restored for offices and archives work rooms. The fourth floor contained only one finished room where gym-type equipment was found. Since the school stood abandoned from 1936 to 1983, there was extensive damage to the unfinished walls, ceiling, and floors of the fourth floor. We left the Fourth Ward School Museum after ringing the bell (with the assistance of the docent) and drove north on C Street to find a parking spot so we could join the other tourists walking up and down.
Here are photos of the Red Dog Saloon, the Delta Saloon, the Tahoe House Hotel, and the Bucket of Blood Saloon (stood out in my mind from those childhood visits!):
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| Red Dog Saloon and view of C Street. Yes, the day before we drove the motor home down this! |
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| My mom's name was Delta - no relation to the saloon! |
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| We didn't go inside any of the saloons or stores - even to see the Suicide Table - because we had Rango with us and we didn't want someone to mistake him for the Sheriff (his full name, don't you know, is Sheriff Rango, after the chameleon in the 2011 computer-animated Western action comedy). |
We were getting a bit hungry so we stopped in at an outside BBQ stand where there were tables set up and had a wheat beer and a pulled pork sandwich with potato salad on the side.
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| Yum! |
There are three churches in town that have been restored and are in use still. The Catholic church, St. Mary's in the Mountains, is quite beautiful and I took one too many photos of it. Here a just two:
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| The steeple showing to the left is the St Paul's Episcopal Church one street down. |
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| A bird (not sure if it was a pigeon, a hawk, or a crow) was perched up on the steeple's cross the entire time we were there. |
Here are a few more photos taken on our walk back down to where we'd parked the car:
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| I don't know anything about this except that I liked the rustic-ness of it. |
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| Oh yes, this is Bernadette, mentioned in Part IV. |
Here's the story on the donkey. Unfortunately, her owner was standing away from her when I took this photo - quite the character. At any rate, we stopped to chat with him and pet the donkey (and donate a couple $$) and the old guy told us that he'd adopted this donkey from the BLM Wild Horse and Donkey program four years ago ("You know what the BLM is, don't you ma'am?"). One thing he and the donkey had in common was she had not been trained and he had not ever trained a donkey. Seems that things worked out, although he noticed that she was getting rather fat soon after he adopted her. Not fat, pregnant; she birthed a little jack on the fourth of July that year. The old guy named him Independence but does not bring him along to C Street to entertain the tourists as he's still a bit wild. He calls this donkey Bernadette after his late wife - "Every time I look at her I think of my wife. I'm a romantic kind of guy."
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| Speaking of donkeys - a rusty bit tucked between buildings. |
We finished out our visit by driving away from C Street to take a look at the rest of the town's buildings and where its 855 residents (as of the 2010 Census) live and work.
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| A beautifully restored mansion on B Street. |
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| View looking out over the Comstock mining area towards Reno. |
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| Looking east towards the train depot (Truckee-Virginia Railroad). We didn't go there because there was a huge group, including tour buses, there and we wanted to avoid that. |
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| Just a cool shot from the Fourth Ward School view area. |
We had spent about four hours here and were ready to head back to Dayton, pick up a few groceries, and get ready to leave Sunday morning for Lee Vining and our Yosemite adventure. Now we can say that we've been to Virginia City!
Watch for the next installment of our Northern California (and Nevada!) Road Trip Adventure.
