Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 056-3 - July 2002 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: 2014-03-12 07:24:00 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 July 2002 on — -~ by hummingbirds. Four bedrooms were back against the hillside and overlooking the [narrow gauge railroad] station. The one across from the banistered stairway by my mother’s window was the nursery from where we peeked and giggled when newlywed guests, General and Mrs. Bulkely Wells, embraced as they climbed to the top floor guestroom. I slept in my father’s child’s-bed, an elaborate 1878 Victorian that morphed from crib to youth, and then to adult size just by changing the sideboards that held the slats... . Other rooms, with white iron scroll beds, were along the hall on the far side above the little station and the giant sequoia in the yard; and at the hall’s dark end by the back stairs and bathroom door was a startling wallsized mirror in a huge gilded frame. The first bedroom, beside the etched-glass panels in the great front doors, was mainly for grandparents, uncles and aunts. Next was the room for governesses. . . . A wicker hamper in the dressing room was to hide in, and a telephone was there. Another phone was untouchable in the downstairs halls, where my mother ordered groceries for her household of eight or nine. But the dressing room phone, so close, tempted me, alone there one day, to unhook the receiver that connected to the adult world. I heard the magical “number please,” but I only knew our own, so I tried “818" (I think it was) and hung up in a hurry. Of course the phone rang back, and the voice said that someone was playing with the phone who shouldn’t be. Having ventured into the adult world, legend says I then took to answering and informing “Mrs. Fulton,” that “John is on the phone. The dressing room was always lively. Summer wear was a one-piece cotton romper with buttoned flap in back, feet bare or sandaled for dusty outings, and hair cut in bangs and “so the tips of her ears show” on the sides. But there were hairbrushes with flat wooden backs on the dressing table, and a really naughty child would be The Starr Pool in Memorial Park, where the Fulton children joined other Grass Valley youngsters to enjoy the long hot summers. “turned over my knee”’ and whacked on the bottom. Only once did I reenact that scene, utterly exasperated by a child of my own, but my arm went mysteriously limp, and my child said, “that didn’t even hurt.” Her wide-eyed sisters were laughing, first at her shame, and then at her triumph, so we all joined in and I told them of “the olden days.” One Christmas season the bears were around upstairs. But on Christmas Eve, with grandparents, we all braved the banistered staircase together and emerged to see a sparkling, candle-lit Christmas tree‘ at the end of the ballroom, with toys, including my father’s pony-sized rocking horse. The vision lasted only a short time, of course, as one dared not let the candles burn down. But the wax was still there on the floor to the end. Victorian mansions in the Sierras were enormous piles of lumber, fancied up with more wood in the delicate shapes that power tools made affordable. Predictably, the fate of the Kidder House was to go by fire—first the grand stairway, and then the whole when it was only a shell inhabited by vagrants, as had been the little Kidder engine we discovered round the bend when I took my small girls for them to see what it might have been like to live about 1920 at 225 Bennett Street, Grass Valley, California. It would appear that the Fulton children had a jolly time while they lived in the Kidder Mansion. From these photographs in the possession of Evelyn Gardiner, there were many large children’s parties that must have been gala events. Strangely enough, the local newspaper, in writing of the history of the Kidder Mansion, seemed to indicate that the house was unoccupied from the time Mrs. Kidder left until it was razed in 1982. During the 1960s and 1970s it was vandalized by transients and did not appear to be worth saving.