Dunce

This picture is for all my friends who remember their early school days. My friend and I were visiting Virginia City and playing around in the former school building which is now a museum. The school opened in the early 1870s and was closed in the mid thirties. It is endearing to walk on the old linoleum and wooden floors and to think of all the generations of little black boots that have touched them before us.
I posted pictures of Virginia City before and spoke of the history of this famous miner town that once had more than 200 000 inhabitants in the time of the gold rush.
Today I put in the extras a picture of the museum showing some miners in front of the newly arrived train. Before the rails for the train were laid out , everything, food and building material, had to be brought from Reno high up the mountain on the back of mules. This was shown in a beautiful house,(picture with the iron gate) that once belonged to one of the richest families in town. It was a museum between 1950 and 2004 and is now just barely kept up by its owners. I was in that house once and  the wealth and luxury were just overwhelming. And then to think that the mahogany furniture, the bohemian glass, even the windows, the silverware and curtains, literally everything had been first shipped from Europe to San Francisco, then brought by train to Reno and last been loaded, piece by piece , on the back of patient mules to have them climb up to Virginia City. The view must have been like in the third extra, unobstructed by electrical cables that are now ruining the view everywhere.
The last extra taken next to the huge cemetry, where all the different nations, professions and religions had their own plot, shows the need of money for the keep up of so many formerly beautiful grave sites quite clearly.