The State Orphans’ Home is a large and well-arranged building with a small farm in connection therewith. In this institution a great number of orphan children from all sections of the State are cared for. The home is governed in a paternal way, and the children are well clothed, well fed, and well educated both morally and intellectually.
The town contains several churches of leading denominations, excellent school-houses, and a number of halls of various societies, orders, and lodges. There are half a dozen fine hotels, many large fire-proof stores and business houses, with the usual proportion of neat and attractive retail shops of all kinds, saloons, and the like.
The buildings of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad Company are a noticeable feature of the town. The depot buildings are commodious and conveniently arranged, and are always kept neatly painted and in good repair. In the town they have an immense car shop. The building is in large part constructed of iron. In it are a foundry, machine shop, roundhouse, and car manufactory.
Carson has a large box factory and other manufacturing establishments of several kinds. The place has both electrical lights and gas. It is well supplied with pure mountain water, which is led through all the streets under a heavy pressure. The town site has sufficient slope to the eastward to afford good drainage. The city supports two daily newspapers, the Appeal and Tribune, and has a good theater.
A fine large brick building has this year (1889) been erected in the town by the United States Government. It will contain several public offices. It fills a gap in the center of the town that long stood as a staring vacancy—supplies a “long-felt want.”
There are pleasant drives in all directions from Carson, with smooth and level roads. A mile west of town are Shaw’s Hot Springs, with every convenience for either bathing or swimming. The swimming bath is 60 by 24 feet, 4½ feet deep at one end and 5½ at the other.
All visitors to the town of a scientific turn of mind will wish to visit the State prison and grounds, situated a mile and a half east of the place. A portion of the building now occupied as a State prison was built for a hotel by Col. Abe Curry (of whom the State purchased the property), and was of stone, two stories high, 32 feet wide, and 100 feet long. Colonel Curry also excavated and walled up the magnificent swimming bath now connected with the prison and fed by warm springs.
In the floor of the quarry, beneath from fifteen to twenty feet of strata of sandstone, is a stratum of fine-grained stone that is filled with the tracks of all manner of animals and birds, and even one set of tracks supposed to have been made by some prehistoric giant of the human species. There are tracks of elephants, horses, deer, lions, tigers, panthers, giant cranes, and all manner of creatures. The tracks supposed to be human present the appearance of having been made by a large man wearing moccasins of the undressed hide of some animal. All the tracks tend toward a common point, which must have been a spring or small lake.
Omnibuses run to the Hot Springs and the State prison, and stages leave for Lake Tahoe and Genoa on the arrival of trains.
There are several lumber flumes near Carson that are worthy of inspection.