Views and Vignettes of Virginia City...in My Day A Memory Album by Dorothy Young Nichols - 1980

Mary Ann Young Broddrick, 1980. 2nd. paperback. Good. 11x10x0. Mary Ann Young Broddrick [Published date: 1980]. Soft cover, 45 pp. Second Edition. In good condition. Pictorial paper covers have light bumping and creasing to edges and corners and light overall scuffing and browning from age. Binding tight (staple bound). Pages browned from age but otherwise unmarked, with a few pages quite dark from a laid-in newspaper article. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations. Combines personal memoirs and historical insights, offering a vivid portrayal of life in Virginia City during its heyday. [From Introduction] I don't remember whether the photograph below was taken before or after the 4th of July Parade, but there must have been a Parade. There always was! That summer of 1912 was a memorable one for me for a far different reason; it was the year we got the flush toilet installed at our house. To a 9 year old of that era, this was a luxury of such magnitude as to dwarf everything else. Mother was away, visiting in Sacramento, and I remember that Dad was so anxious to have her home that he wrote and promised her a velvet seat cover for the cherished convenience if only she would hurry back to us. And she did! Born in Gold Hill in 1903, to a family that was already third generation Virginia City, I grew up at a time when the great Comstock millionaires had been replaced by $4 a day miners. Many homes were being demolished and many buildings were vacant, but still Virginia City and Gold Hill were humming communities, busy and industrious and hopeful in that special early-1900 way. Stories of the great bonanza days were part of my childhood, and photographs were kept of those earlier times to remind us of the importance our town had once attained. It was heartening, in the midst of obvious decline, to know how glorious the past had been. So the tales were told and the pictures were treasured, and became interwoven with my memories of the "now" of the first three decades of the 1900s. Those memories, too, are being clouded by the years, names and places forgotten or confused with others . . . or disappearing entirely as the buildings themselves and the people who used them vanish into history. Virginia City in my day was un-restored and unselfconscious, still a busy mining town. The C & C, Chollar, Union, Mexican, Savage, Ophir, and Norcross mines were working three shifts a day and sending ore to Butters' Plant and Mexican Mill. Gold Hill had the Yellow Jacket, Belcher, and Overman pouring ore into the Crown Point Mill. It was a charm distinctly its own, in an era as remote from 1 beginnings. Come share it again with me . .