The famous race of the Confidence and the Queen City, while not featured by gunfire, nearly ended in flames so far as the latter vessel was concerned. The Confidence, of California Steam, burned Philadelphia coal, imported at some expense; the Queen City, which belonged to the Marysville outfit, depended upon the cheaper and more plentiful local supply of wood. So […]
Kitchen, bakery, and millstones: The interior rooms, probably finished in 1842/43, contained a large kitchen to feed the dozens of fur trappers, tradesmen, and others who lived there or frequently visited — California’s Olden Golden Days blog
My entry for Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge this week. This topic is fairly self-explanatory. Let’s see how creative you can get with this topic. I’m looking forward to what you all decide to post.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sacramento River Delta fairly bustled with paddlewheel steamboats traveling between the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco. Most of these iconic riverboats have been long forgotten; but the sister ships Delta King and Delta Queen, launched in 1927, are two survivors of that bygone era. For 50 years one of the most […]
Here are some images I wanted to include for Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge this week, but they just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of my post.
The theme of Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is Letter L – Needs to start with the letter L and have at least two syllables. Let’s see how creative you can we can be on this challenge. Have fun with this week’s challenge.
As I walked down 7th Street in Sacramento, headed for the nearest Light Rail stop, my eye was caught by the vibrant colors on this building. The wall is only a small part of the former Hotel Marshall (opened in 1911 as the Hotel Clayton). Downtown Sacramento is changing — some of its older buildings are being demolished to make […]
During the 1960s, every road trip I took with my family down Interstate 80 toward San Francisco was highlighted by a few familiar landmarks. One of these was the old “Mothball Fleet” anchored in Suisun Bay. At the time I didn’t really understand the significance of these ships, but I was always impressed by their bulky outlines far away across […]
The Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge for the week of October 25, 2017. Goodbye, straight lines. Hello, curves. While I pondered my response to this week’s challenge, I happened to be reading a book called The Porcelain Thief by Huan Hsu. I acquired an uncorrected proof of the book purely by accident a few months ago, digging it out of a pile of used books for sale. I wanted to read it partly because China (the country) has always fascinated me; another reason was that some of the shards pictured on the book’s cover reminded me of a few broken pieces of pottery I found years ago near Mormon Island at Folsom Lake, during the winter when the lake level was down. Of course, the shards I found are almost certainly relatively cheap, everyday dinnerware from the early 20th century rather than rare Chinese porcelain. Still, the closer I study them, the more fascinating they become. I may never know what stories these small shards have to tell, but their curved decorations and shapes remain intriguing to me, and I protect them as though they were priceless artifacts. We peered into the pit… The walls were layer upon layer of collapsed kilns and shard beds. The rounded forms of broken teacups looked like clutches of fossilized dinosaur eggs. ‘Those shards two meters down, they’re about a hundred years old,’ he said. That was only halfway to the bottom. ‘And there’s […]