I’m here at the Baldwin Estate in So. Lake Tahoe as a volunteer and since I’ve got keys and everything, I thought I’d throw some pics of the place your way.
This is the volunteers computer room where I spend a lot of my time, the public doesn’t come in here. It use to be a storage room or the maids room, no one knows anymore:
Next door is the laundry & electrical room. I was very impressed with the work done by a previous volunteer…he hid modern electrical wiring, up to code, behind the original electrical panels. The first pic shows the old stuff, the second the new behind the old:
Here’s a couple pics of the laundry room stuff, note the old style heater:
Then you move from the electrical & laundry room into the cook stove & reefer room:
This reefer is original from the early ’20’s and I just had it fixed yesterday, working fine now, the last time it was worked on was 5 years ago, before that, anyone’s guess. The crew used it to store their lunches.
And then into the serving pantry:
I missed getting a shot of the dining room…forgot, sorry. I would call it, cozy.
And finally, here is the living room, the grand room with the 25 foot ceilings and the chandeliers and stuff:
Then some more pics from the living room. The grand door is huge and opens up onto a view of the beach…note that the trees were much smaller when folks lived here:
Here’s the porch:
Here’s a good view of the ornate door, it’s huge and heavy (at least in my expirience):
If you spin around in the living room and face West, you’d be looking out at this:
And the other side of the courtyard, what’s interesting is that this place was made for those lazy afternoons and evenings when people would sit around this courtyard and just talk about the events of the day, or about Chaucer, Shelly, Fitzgerald or Poe, and usually after a game of tennis or a swim. Ya see, they didn’t have television…
This part of the museum is now a retrospective of the lives of the Washoe of the area. They were totally robbed of their ancestral lands (evidence of the tribe being here in Tahoe for 12,000 years) and after years of pleading, begging and anger, they were finally awarded $2.41 per acre for the lands taken from them. This small section of the museum tells their story. What was initially 5000 people shrank to 500 in just a few years after the white man came to the area.
There’s at least 4 or 5 other rooms I’m not showing here. And there are more rooms upstairs. What a life for these people. But, ya know, they’re all dead. All that money didn’t stop that.