Chapter 7: Kids on the Comstock

Chapter 7: Kids on the Comstock Between 1910 and 1920, Alexander and Louise Wise and their two children, Verna and Fred, moved into the upstairs apartments of the Werrin building described in chapter two. They stayed long enough for young Fred to leave pencil lines on the wallpaper, documenting his growth. Four marks indicate he grew from 54½ to 55½ inches. Census records give his year of birth as 1907, and by comparing his height to growth charts, it is possible to estimate his age at ten years, placing him and his family in John Werrin’s building within a year or two of 1917. Of course, growth charts indicate a wide variety of possible ages, and it is easy to wonder whether Fred was preoccupied by his height because he was either shorter or taller than average. It is impossible to know the answer to this question, but it does seem reasonable to conclude that his family lived in the lodging house for perhaps one or two years in the middle to latter part of the decade. They were some of the last occupants of the apartments. The population of Virginia City had dwindled to such an extent that for the few who remained, it was increasingly easy to purchase an abandoned house for back taxes. What had been a tightly-packed, vibrant, urban community had become quiet with scattered families recalling a better time. The Wise family was part of the surge in population that coincided with the 1903 discovery of a small bonanza at the north end of Virginia City. Alexander, a mining engineer in the revived excavations, went on to play an important role in the development of a cyanide processing mill in nearby American Flat, but he was not the only one to leave a Comstock legacy. Fred also left his mark. Literally. History is too often defined by adults who shaped the destiny of society, but children can breathe life into the past. Italo Gavazzi, “American Flat: Stepchild of the Comstock Lode – Part I,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 41:2 (Summer 1998) 92-101, and Robert E. Kendall, “American Flat: Stepchild of the Comstock Lode – Part II,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 41:2 (Summer 1998) 102-14. <SPACE> The most obvious child-related artifacts archaeologists recover are toys, scattered throughout diverse sites. In Virginia City, the majority are marbles and doll parts, but there were other things as well, including crude, pressed-metal wagons and a tiny tin rocking horse with rider, no more than an inch high. What has failed to surface in the archaeological record are paper dolls and soldiers. Paper is tenacious in the arid Comstock climate, but that only means it survives there more often than in other environments. Most paper eventually disintegrates one way or another. [insert 7.1] The toys that do survive are striking in two ways. First, the vast majority are simple and of only a few types. This was a time when the large companies were just discovering that marketing to children was a way to capture a source of expendable income. From the 1870s to the 1890s, companies including Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck began printing toy-devoted pages in catalogues. Macy’s in New York featured a toy department just as Virginia City was gaining fame internationally for the Big Bonanza. Still, this trend was only beginning to emerge in the East, and its effect in nineteenth-century Comstock archaeology may not be clear. See the work of Jane E. Baxter, in particular, “Dominant Discourses, Lived Lives: The Historical Archaeology of Childhood in the American Mining West,” paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Sacramento, California, 2006, and see her book, The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture (Walnut Creek, California: Alta Mira Press, 2005). For regional historical treatments of the subject, see Elliot West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents, 1850-1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), and Elliot West, Growing up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Contrasting with the more refined world of manufactured toys, there were items that served as toys but may not be recognized in that context, even if they did survive. Jane Baxter, who has completed cutting edge work on the archaeology of Comstock youth, cites a March 18, 1870 article in the Territorial Enterprise that describes a game children called “Pee Wee,” that consisted of a block of wood and a bit of string. Objects that Virginia City residents in 1870 might have regarded as rubbish could have another meaning for imaginative children. Baxter, “Dominant Discourses, Lived Lives.” The second observation comes from where archaeologists find toys. At times, marbles and doll parts seem ubiquitous in Virginia City, but there are some places—including the locations of homes—where they are more likely to surface. Archaeologists were surprised to find toys at the site of O’Brien and Costello’s Shooting Gallery and Saloon. For the excavation team, the items implied that children played in an establishment where drunken men shot pistols at targets. By today’s standards, this was an absurd business, as discussed in chapter six. Adding children to the mix heightens the bizarre formula, but while retrieving artifacts, there was no reason to question another odd layer of information. In fact, Baxter’s careful analysis of the location of the toys suggests the actual playground was outside the saloon along its northern wall where Flowery Street became a narrow alley progressing up the hill. Once again, lab work often corrects meaning surmised in the field. Hardesty, et. al., “Public Archaeology on the Comstock.” Flowery was one of the community’s oldest east-west streets, providing access from Virginia City to the Flowery Mining District down Six Mile Canyon. As the road ascended above C Street, it became too steep for wagons, pinching into nothing more than an alley and footpath between C to B streets. In the 1990s, it was still possible to find disintegrating boards that were part of a staircase giving residents sound footing on the slope as they climbed past fruit trees at the back of one of the businesses. And for the purpose of understanding these children and what they were doing, one can imagine their taking refuge in an alley free of wagons and horses, where they could play games in relative solitude, only occasionally disturbed by a pedestrian or the gunfire inside the saloon. From the historian’s point of view, the idea of children playing in this area comes as a shock. O’Brien and Costello’s business was in the center of the rough area known as the Barbary Coast. Documents describe a block not noted for its families or for being a safe place for a game of marbles. The community confronted a crisis over this very issue in 1877 when the Fourth Ward School, roughly two hundred yards to the south, first welcomed students. The school’s opening meant children enrolled there and living north of the Barbary Coast passed through that neighborhood twice a day. R. James, The Roar and the Silence, 177-80, 185-6. It is tempting to conclude from the toys that children playing on the way back from school left them in the alley, but it is impossible to know: the objects could have dated to the critical time immediately after 1877 when town leaders launched an effort to clean up the Barbary Coast, or children may have lost them there before or after that period. Efforts at reform met with limited success, but drug use, violence, prostitution, and other vices nevertheless declined, making the idea of children walking back and forth more palatable. The Barbary Coast remained one of the poorer neighborhoods, however, and it was not until the 1920s when a developer placed small cottages there that the character of the district changed. Still, Hardesty’s excavation of the area in 2008 identified the presence of residential debris associated with building platforms facing B Street, directly above the Barbary Coast. Families with children certainly lived within feet of the worst expression of vice. As of this writing, a final report has not been submitted on the 2008 project. Thanks to Ron Gallagher, Virginia City native, for help with the twentieth-century history of his family’s property along the old Barbary Coast. Poverty, gender, and childhood may manifest archaeologically in ways that have yet to be tested. Census records demonstrate that during the Comstock depression beginning in the late 1870s, economic hardship more likely forced households with girls to squat in abandoned cabins high on the hillside, above the water line that fed the community. Parents with boys benefited from youthful ambition that scoured the town for every source of available income no matter how small. Victorian standards held the girls back, and their families suffered, as everyone waited for better times to return. Eventually, most abandoned the mining district for better opportunities, but they left a rich assortment of archaeology. An examination of the resource awaits to see how this peculiar expression of gender and mores in the nineteenth century manifests in the material record. Ronald M. James, “On the Edge of the Big Bonanza: Declining Fortunes and the Comstock Lode,” Mining History Journal (1996). [insert 7.2] <SPACE> At the other end of the social spectrum stands the Fourth Ward School, which survives as a monument to the children who lived on the Comstock. Fred Wise attended the institution, graduating in 1924, but he was only one of hundreds who passed through the halls of this remarkable example of public architecture. Considered as material culture, the school illuminates the past. Architect C. M. Bennett designed the building to house over one thousand students. The institution served the city’s fourth political subdivision, and at one time or another, each of the three other wards also had schools. As the community continued its downward slide in the early twentieth century, the Storey County school district retreated to the Fourth Ward. Even though it was on the southern edge of town, removed from most of the school-age children who remained in town, the Fourth Ward School was the largest and most sophisticated of its nineteenth-century counterparts. The First Ward School on the north end of town survived longer than those of the Second and Third wards, but the town abandoned the 1874 building in the first decades after the turn of the century and then demolished the derelict in 1936. The Fourth Ward School survived longer than all the others because it was large and remarkably modern. It boasted avant-garde innovations including running water serving each floor, flush toilets, central heating, and room divisions that allowed for team teaching. True, the central heating nearly caught the place on fire during the first really cold winter, but the building was a progressive attempt to offer Comstock children the best of cutting edge design for the time. Susan A. James, Virginia City’s Fourth Ward School: From Pride to Glory (Virginia City: Fourth Ward School Museum, 2003). Although the community built the Fourth Ward School for a dynamic population that seemed destined to grow, the mines started failing within a few years of opening the facility and the town’s population started a steady decline. The institution’s student body never exceeded nine hundred, and indeed the school followed the collapse of industry throughout its history of service. Nevertheless, those who attended the Fourth Ward School for the sixty years between 1877 and its closing in 1936 left a trail of evidence that they were there. [insert 7.3] Thousands of footfalls on the central staircase wore the wooden treads. At some point, the school district cannibalized pulley belts from an abandoned mill, cutting them into pieces and tacking them onto the stairs. The vulcanized canvas is evidence of failing fortunes. A school district, lacking the funds to refurbish what had been a beautiful expression of opulence, now resorted to using discarded industrial materials. And a sophisticated milling industry that had produced the modern equivalent of billions in gold and silver was being dismembered for spare parts. Directly above the stair treads is one of the more vivid reminders of a child’s life in Virginia City. The balustrade of the central staircase is made of solid wood, with its vertical boards stained in alternating light and dark tones, a pattern known as candy striping. Cutting diagonally across the boards are black streaks that become larger and darker towards the bottom of each course of stairs. Most appear on the balustrade descending to the main floor, but even the highest ones show these marks. Here is evidence of hundreds of children sliding down the balustrade, a quick descent that school officials prohibited. And children being children, they ignored the rules and opted for fun instead, digging in with their leather-soled shoes to slow their speed at the end of the trip. The intrepid nature of this practice is made most apparent when standing on the top floor and looking down as the flights of stairs switch back and forth. To fall from that height could have been fatal, but what better opportunity to prove courage for a child. A similar opportunity existed along the perimeter of the school’s mansard roof. The distinguishing feature of the Second Empire style of architecture was a nearly flat roof that bent down abruptly into what amounted to a sloping wall. Dormers were then cut into the roof to allow the attic to become fully-useable space. Along the edge of the bottom portion of the roof, was a flat platform that served as the top of the cornice, joining roof to wall. In the case of the Fourth Ward School, this feature is about two feet wide and easily accessible through the dormer windows. According to oral histories, boys often sat on the cornice platform to have lunch, smoke, or just enjoy the fresh air and the view. Some assert they occasionally played tag. While such a game on the ground gave victory to the swift, running along the edge of the roof, four stories above ground, would have required finesse as well as speed. A misstep could, again, be fatal, so the game became a delicate ballet. Describing all of this, however, is nothing compared to standing at a top-floor window and peering at that ledge with its nearly forty-foot drop to the ground. Only the actual place, surrounded by the period’s material culture, can grant a real understanding of what those boys were doing a century ago. Thanks to executive director Barbara Mackay, the Historic Fourth Ward School Museum, for assistance with this material. Inside, there is evidence of more sedate activity. The floors of the classrooms exhibit additional wear patterns that only thousands of feet could produce. The school had hundreds of the new Chicago style desks where each piece of furniture consisted of a seat with a desk projecting to the rear for the child behind. Desks feature a small hole to hold ink bottles. A metal frame supported this design. Screws attached the iron feet to the floor. When assembled, each unit became part of a long line of chairs and desks. This was an innovation that replaced the more traditional Kentucky-bench-style desks that sat two children, side-by-side. S. James, Virginia City’s Fourth Ward School. Most of the Fourth Ward School’s desks and chairs have long since been removed to storage in upper floor rooms. What remains are the footprints of each desk and chair. The floorboards wore around the iron feet of the furniture, underneath which, the wood is nearly pristine except for the three-hole pattern left by the screws. The most dramatic examples of wear, however, are deep groves in the floor. This is where children’s feet kicked back and forth by the hour as the scholars sat, unable to expend youthful energy in any other way. The pattern is repeated hundreds of times: raised wood where desks stood and furrows indicate where a seated student’s shoes would do their damage. Another sort of destruction comes in the form of graffiti throughout the school. Carpenters and students left penciled and carved names. The tradition lasted well into the twentieth century as graduates returned to the alma mater for a sentimental look and a chance to leave one last mark. Evidence of the classroom experience comes in the form of hundreds of desk carvings, yet another expression of tedium and opportunity coinciding. Of particular interest are desks that have deep notches cut along the edge facing the student. Oral history collected from a visitor suggests boys used these to hold wooden rulers, which could catapult spitballs across the room. It takes oral histories to understand the significance of a cornice platform or a cut in a desk, but nothing more than touching the wooden floor is needed to appreciate the furrows, scars of a former time. Here, the material culture bears the imprint of use and a vivid image of what it was to be a child on the Comstock emerges. Again thanks to Barbara Mackay and also to Susan James, scholar in residence, the Historic Fourth Ward School Museum, for assistance with material related to the school. The school is home to many other artifacts that also speak to the life of children in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The largest of these are printing presses that students operated to produce the Dynamo, the school newspaper. The Comstock was known for its cutting-edge journalism. The Territorial Enterprise was internationally respected, and it, together with several other newspapers, contributed important names in the history of western ink. The greatest of these was, of course, Mark Twain, but others, including Dan De Quille, Joseph Goodman, and Alf Doten, to name only a few, are remembered as giants in their field. The Territorial Enterprise museum in the center of town has a basement print room that houses an amazingly-well preserved assemblage of journalistic technology from the 1880s and 90s. This equipment was state-of-the-art, as opposed to the machines stored in the Fourth Ward School, where the community’s oldest surviving printing presses stand ready for use. As local newspapers updated their operations, they donated discarded equipment to the school district. Besides presses, there are cabinets that held thousands of moveable type with letters and symbols. R. James, The Roar and the Silence, 76-77; and see Wells Drury, An Editor on the Comstock Lode (Palo Alto, California: Pacific Books, 1948) 181-209; Richard E. Lingenfelter and Karen Rix Gash, The Newspapers of Nevada: A History and Bibliography, 1854-1979 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984); and Jake Highton, Nevada Newspaper Days: A History of Journalism in the Silver State (Stockton: Heritage West Books, 1990). Other objects include a science experiment that generated static electricity and a simple, crudely-constructed bell that called students to class. On the top floor was the gymnasium, where gymnast rings hung from ropes and basketball hoops waited for action. Because the rooms are square, there were no opposite ends for the hoops. In addition, school officials had to discourage flying basketballs near windows in the dormers on the north and east sides. The hoops consequently hang on the south and west walls, and a team taking the ball from one hoop to the next was required to go to the neutral northeast corner before traveling back to the opposite goal. Some of the most surprising artifacts emerged from restoration projects that removed floor boards at the school. Among the items workers retrieved were a silk scarf, student drawings and poetry, and disintegrating pictures of Lincoln and Washington that once served as inspiration on classroom walls. The debris came from the basement home economics room and from the third-floor multipurpose room, where sliding pocket doors could partition off two classrooms or open for a larger space. Calendars from 1896 and 1904 indicate when earlier work on the floors had occurred, providing the chance for material to be hidden. A 1904 issue of Scientific American and practice teaching exams with the names of graduating students verify the dates. Other items include pen nibs and an ink-soaked hanky, the remnants of a toppled bottle at a time when the art of writing had challenges far removed from the experience of today’s students. Discarded spelling tests, newspaper comics, and notes passed between students add to this portrait of everyday life. A paper airplane, collected from the 1904 stash of material, recalls every student’s fascination with the dynamics of flight, heightened perhaps, by the achievement of the Wright brothers the year before. And here, of course, is the illusive paper toy that has yet to emerge from a Comstock archaeological excavation. Again, thanks to Barbara Mackay for assistance with this material. Some of the artifacts are on display at the Historic Fourth Ward School Museum, but it has not been discussed in print. <SPACE> John Taylor Waldorf grew up on the Comstock during the 1870s and went on to work as editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. Occasionally, he would write a column about what it was like to grow up in the midst of some of the richest mines in the world. In 1968, his daughter gathered the articles and published them as a book, which she named, A Kid on the Comstock. There are other written sources dealing with childhood in Virginia City, but Waldorf’s recollections are arguably the best. Material culture, on the other hand, can offer another way to bring life to this rarely documented aspect of the community. Waldorf, A Kid on the Comstock. Much of what the Fourth Ward School reveals is about ambiance. Walking through the school provides an impression of what it was like to be a student on the Comstock during its bonanza period. The same can be said about understanding everyday life when considering the Werrin lodging house and the Flowery Street alley. Impressions and ambiance, however, are not scientific terms. Things that are evocative of the past are, nevertheless, powerful, often in a way that complements the written record. The stereotype of nineteenth-century education emphasizes stern disciplinarians, but oral histories describing sitting on the edge of the roof and the evidence of skid marks down the balustrade tell of more boisterous moments amid the everyday rigor. Every indication—from basketball hoops and printing presses to doodled drawings beneath the floor boards—are part of a school that former students consistently remembered with fondness. True, students wore furrows in the wooden floor when they must have felt incarcerated, and desk carvings are too often the product of boredom, but the little city that was the Fourth Ward School was a complete place with joy and sadness, intellectual growth and monotony. The material that survives brings this aspect of the past to life. <SPACE> Waldorf recalled how boys would loiter in front of Piper’s Opera House, hoping the famed silver baron, John Mackay, would happen by and pay for the lot of miscreants to enter the theater. Happily for the young souls, the millionaire often obliged, and one of the more important theatrical venues in the West also became part of the children’s story. How the institution and its wealth of material remains fit in with the larger community history is the subject of the following chapter.  PAGE 175