Judge Daniel Webster Virgin

Marker is located on building above the Pony Express Marker seen in photo.

Photo on Display at the Mormon Station State Historic Park Museum.

[This certificate is on display at the Mormon Station State Historic Park Museum.]

This document is signed by the first Territorial Governor James W. Nye (1861-64) and Territorial Secretary Orion Clemens, brother of Samuel Clemens, (Mark Twain).

Here in the jail area visitors can see the original cells used from 1865 until 1916. The stove was used after the turn of the century to heat the jail room. The steel privy in the corner was used by prisoners as they contemplated a “cleaner life”. The ball & chains, each 20 inches in circumference and weighing 33 pounds, were used in the 1880s as prisoners were allowed out of their cells for exercise.

The jail was not always divided up the way it is now. Prisoners were taken out of their cells to “exercise” in the open room that is now divided into separate exhibit spaces.

Before the courthouse was restored and converted into a museum, there was a hole in the ceiling above the left-handed cell.

A prisoner had climbed up on top of the cell, when he was let out for exercise, and tried cutting an escape hole in the ceiling.

The unlucky prisoner discovered a half-inch thick steel plate above the dummy ceiling which separated the jail from the courtroom above.

This is the hearthstone from the home of “Snowshoe Thompson” at Diamond Valley, Ca. Thompson’s real name was “Tom Torsteinson Rui” which he changed to ‘John A. Thompson’.
This stone is the property of Snowshoe Thompson Lodge 78, Sons of Norway, Yuba City, Ca.

On June 16, 1858, the families of Arnold Trimmer and Frank Walker who both traveled west to Nevada in the same wagon train arrived in Carson Valley and settled in the town of Genoa. This bell, which was sandcast in Sheffield, England in 1865 was shipped via clipper ship around the horn and up to San Francisco, thence by wagon freight over the Sierras to Genoa. Here it was planned to grace the belfry of the newly, proposed Catholic Church. On the same day that the wagonload of lumber arrived for the church, the exciting news of a rich, gold strike in California spread like wildfire through the Carson Valley and by morning of the following day there was no around capable of building the proposed church, so the leading townspeople decided to use the lumber and the bell for a much needed schoolhouse, which stood about four blocks north and west of here. Mr. Trimmer, who is one of the Carson Valley Historical Society’s trustees, attended the school as a young boy. About 1916, the original schoolhouse was vacated and all the furniture and the bell was moved here to the courthouse. The bell has been traditionally rung on Independence Day.