Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 069-2 - April 2015 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: 2019-07-23 13:42:08 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:06:33 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:06:33

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

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NCHS Bulletin April 2015 The Church Street home of Mary T. Hamilton as it appeared in 1880. Most likely it is the same boarding house she and her husband Gavin were building in the spring of 1853 when she applied to Justice of the Peace Nathan Davis to become a sole trader in her own name. (Lithograph drawing from the 1880 History of Nevada County, California.) and paying for the notice to appear for three weeks in a local newspaper.'® The law was intended to allow women to sustain themselves and their children in a world where husbands were absent for long periods of time, or had lost the family’s money by drinking of gambling—or had simply disappeared. In the spring and summer of 1853 Nathan certified the declarations of three such Grass Valley women as sole traders: Clara F. Smith in March, Mary T. Hamilton in May, and Priscilla Scott in June.”° The timing of Clara Smith’s declaration is particularly interesting. On March 4, 1853, her husband Ebenezer G. “Sneezer” Smith had advertised to sell the Golden Gate Saloon, located on Main Street in Grass Valley, so he and his family could return to the Atlantic States.*! The saloon was a going business with a bar and restaurant open from 6:00 o’clock AM until 12 o’clock PM. Plans for relocating the family apparently changed, or were not fully endorsed by Clara, for on March 18th she declared her intention of keeping a public saloon and restaurant. By the fall of that year Clara advertised that “Prices, in spite of hard times, always moderate. Another thousand customers can be accommodated.” The saloon was also used that fall for public events such as a constable’s sale and a wedding fete involving three happy couples.” Banker Alonzo Delano remarked about Clara’s saloon: What do you see now that is so curious? Why, that picture of a gate, ready to swing open with the word “Golden” before it on the sign, is purely Californian in conception, original, graphic, and nice as the oysters and cold and hot toddies that you swing into your mouth from the counter of the saloon.” If Ebenezer Smith did go East, he was back in Nevada County by February 11, 1855.%>* Mary T. Hamilton, wife of Gavin Hamilton, had ambitious plans. She declared that she would be in the business of conducting and keeping a boarding house then being built by her on Church Street, buying and selling and trading in merchandise, raising stock and poultry, and mining by the use of hired labor. The Hamilton family home, perhaps the same one originally used as the boarding house, is illustrated in the 1880 History of Nevada County, along with the auditorium and theater, Hamilton Hall, built in 1855 by her husband Gavin.”° The third sole trader was Priscilla Scott, who declared she would be in the business of doing laundry, raising poultry stock, keeping a dairy, and selling milk on her Grass Valley property. Since milk then sold for more than twice as much as whisky, Mrs. Scott could reasonably have anticipated considerable profits.*’ She was likely the “Mrs. Scott” of the couple that Bean’s Directory described as the “first family in Grass Valley,” and the person described in the 1880 history as “the first [white] woman to shed the light of her passage upon Grass Valley.”* Nathan made no comments in his letters concerning the self-employment of Mmes. Smith, Hamilton or Scott, but elsewhere in his letters his views on a woman’s role in society were clear. He disapproved of women of his own class working outside the home—most especially