Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 053-4 - October 1999 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 6 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2014-03-05 08:26:46 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:06:01 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:06:01

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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NCHS Bulletin October 1999 United States Hotel and reopened in August as the National Exchange Hotel. Z. P.’s residence was on upper Spring Street and he also owned two lots behind the National Hotel. One, on the corner of Spring and Pine Streets, he gave to the Baptists in town for the site of their First Baptist Church built in 1855. It was here that Emma Nevada made her singing debut at the age of three or four. The other lot adjoining it, where the English Pub (“Mad Dogs and Englishmen”) now stands, was the location of Davis’ blacksmith shop. There is a fascinating letter in our files at Searls Library from Minerva Lester Power, granddaughter of the Davises, who lived with them until after she graduated from high school. In it she tells how, when she was a small girl of seven, her grandfather (who had injured his hand in a gun accident) asked her to come to the blacksmith shop and work the bellows when he was starting up the forge. One day she went out to the shop and her grandfather told her she wouldn’t have that chore anymore. He had made a water wheel that he attached to the bellows for the operation of the bellows. It so happened that Z. P. Davis was a good friend of Lester Pelton. One day she was in the shop when the two men were discussing the water wheel. Pelton suggested that Davis should have it patented, but Davis was unwilling to deal with all the necessary red tape. Pelton asked if he could have a model of the wheel. Z. P. made one for him and it was not long after this that Lester Pelton’s wheel was patented. In her letter Minerva does not give an actual description of her grandfather’s wheel so we don’t know if it had the famous split cups, but I like to think that Lester Pelton probably received as much inspiration from Z. P. Davis’s water wheel as he did from the stream of water hitting the nose of that famous Camptonville cow. Z. P. and Sarah spent the rest of their lives in Nevada City. Z. P. died in 1902 and Sarah in 1906. Sarah and Zeno P. Davis in 1856 with daughter Cleora Adelaide and their young son. (Searls Library photo) W. P. BROWNE THE DIARY OF W. P. BROWNE of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania describes the journey to California by sea and across the Isthmus of Panama. On March 31, 1853, he traveled to" Philadelphia and from there to New York City. There he runs into some other Pennsylvanians from his home county and books passage on the steamer Georgia with them. They set sail at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5. Before evening Browne became so seasick he could neither eat, walk, nor sleep. In fact, most of the passengers on the ship are seasick most of the time. Nine days later, on April 14, they arrive at Aspinwall (later named Colon) on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus. The city was quite low and swampy and he “felt the heat more than I ever had in my life before.” The first part of the crossing is a two-hour train ride from Apinwall to the Chagres River. After lunch in a bamboo shanty they go by boat up the river to the town of Gorgona, a three-hour ride. There they spent the night. Early the next morning, Browne (along with 15 others) starts by mule train for Panama, a 27-mile trip. The route is very steep and rugged, and sometimes along a hill holes have to be cut in the rock for the mules’ feet. They were in a hurry to get to Panama so that they could register their tickets on the first available ship leaving there: We crossed little brooks every two or three miles... we drank out of all of them although the water was al= most as warm as milk fresh from a cow. Browne and his party arrived in Panama early in the afternoon on Saturday, April 16. They were there until the following Tuesday. He notes that the city was ... all bustle and tumult even on Sunday. Many Americans get drunk, gamble, play roulette, and act as if they were turned into half-devils. In all there were about 500 Americans there at the time. I found them to be a much rougher set than I had anticipated—nine tenths of them being profane swearers . . . not more than 20 of the whole number attended church—five of them being persons I had taken with me. Browne boards the steamer California on April 19. There are more days of seasickness. Some of the passengers have Panama fever, and there is an outbreak of measles on board. Any person who dies is tossed overboard. The ship makes three stops before reaching San Francisco. At Acapulco they take on coal, water and provisions. Many of the passengers go ashore and return with quantities of oranges, lemons and limes. There is another stop at San Diego. The stop at Monterey is brief—just long enough to change the mail: . a littke American village surrounded partly by beautiful timber, and partly by fields under cultivation— ~ the first we had seen of either on the Pacific coast.