Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology And History In Virginia City

3: Authentic Saloon Sets

cert with a photo of the building (figure 2.4). Taken in 1967, the photo shows a two-story building with horizontal wood siding. Digging at the site of that building, after it had become an empty lot, archaeologists found that the original structure featured rock side walls and brick front and rear walls.7 Brick facades on the front and back elevations of the structure conveyed the look of a more opulent structure, while less-expensive building materials made up the building’s side walls. Given the dense spacing of buildings in boomtowns like Virginia City, this “deceptive construction technique” was likely a common feature of the urban mining landscape.8 The 1967 snapshot is somewhat deceptive as a means of examining the building, since many alterations likely took place between the 1870s when O’Brien and Costello’s was in operation and the day in 1967 when the photo was taken. There is, however, still valuable information in the photo, such as 48 x b o o m t o w n s a l o o n s Fig. 2.3. A modified section from Augustus Koch’s 1875 “Bird’s-eye View of Virginia City” shows the Boston Saloon at the southwest corner of D and Union Streets; Union Street appears as partially shadowed by the saloon’s neighboring building. Courtesy of the Library of Congress the fact that the building stood three stories tall. The Saloon and Shooting Gallery operated out of the first floor, and other activities, such as boarding, probably took place on the second and third floors. The photo also shows several double-hung windows lining the north and east elevations of the second story, with at least one window visible on the east elevation’s atticlike third story. The windows on the first story are visible only on the front east elevation of the building. It appears that there were no windows along the north and south sides of the first floor.9 With no windows to let in light along the side walls, this saloon probably had a rather dark ambience. The lack of side windows did, however, likely make a suitable layout for a shooting gallery. Similar to O’Brien and Costello’s establishment, the Hibernia Brewery operated out of the first story of a two-story building at the south end of C Street. Rectangular in plan, the building sat with its long axis perpendicular Facades of Public Drinking x 49 Fig. 2.4. The building that once held O’Brien and Costello’s Saloon and Shooting Gallery. Not long after this 1967 photo was taken, the building site became an empty lot, adding another archaeological site to Virginia City’s modern landscape. Courtesy of the Comstock Historic District Commission, Virginia City, Nevada to that street. The building spanned about 60 feet in length and was 20 or 30 feet wide.10 Because the building that once housed the Hibernia Brewery is no longer extant and because graphics of the structure are absent from the historical records, archaeological investigations were the source for most of the architectural elements discovered that were associated with this operation . For example, masons constructed the building of brick with a repeated pattern of four stretchers and one header. It was then painted white. Archaeologists also discovered a four-foot-deep pit dug into the native sediments. A series of uncut stone blocks arranged around the perimeter of the pit served as a foundation for the building’s brick walls. Given this construction style, the first floor of the structure sat slightly below street level, which means people who entered the saloon from C Street stepped down into a sunken room. Doors and Windows Naturally, doors provided portals by which people entered and exited saloons; however, western films often show victims of fights flung out of shattering windows, completely bypassing the doors as a means of exit.11 Whether used for exit in place of windows or not, doors do represent a component of architecture that illustrates the contrast between the western saloons of history and those created by powerful Hollywood imagery. For example, Hollywood typically shows open saloon entrances, framed in weathered wood with short, swinging butterfly doors that fling open as gun- fighters, outlaws, and lawmen burst in.12 Even though this design for doors maintains a strong hold on national and international collective recollections of saloons, it...