already, we live in a Gold Rush theme park. It's all about the 49ers up here. Actually, it's the reason highway 49 is named as such. You can't throw a rock without hitting an abandoned mine, or monument, or historical something-or-other having to do with gold. Including us. See the picture of our house? It was designed to look like an old stamp mill from the 1850's. When I read that piece of information (it was on the real estate brochure), it didn't make sense to me. I hadn't realized the post office had needed so much postage out west in those days! Were those rabid gold-panners big letter-writers, as well? Who knew? Well, of course not. They were too busy cutting down all the trees and thinking of silly names for their mining camps to write letters. Nearby we have Rough and Ready and You Bet, and Gouge Eye (yecch). Rough and Ready is extra famous because it seceded from the US for a few months until they realized
they wouldn't be able to celebrate the 4th of July. No one claims all the 49ers were geniuses.Anyway, a stamp mill is just a building that houses the big stamps (for really BIG packages!--no, not really). A stamp is an iron rod with a very heavy weight on the end of it. A bunch of them are lined up vertically on cams that were powered by water and under which the gold ore would be passing by on a conveyor belt. The ore would be crushed to dust, so they could get the gold out easier. As you can imagine, it wasn't a such a quiet operation. The biggest, richest and last mine to operate in this area, the Empire Mine (its a whole big interesting historical state park here, now), was operational until 1956 (after 106 years). I happened to talk to a another visitor to the Empire Mine SHPark recently who had been around 10 years old when the mine closed. He said that the stamp mills ran 24/7 and were constant white noise through the whole area. They don't use stamps so much in gold mining, more, though there's plenty of other nasty stuff they do use. One company wants to reopen the Idaho-Maryland Mine (just a few miles away from us on, uh, Idaho-Maryland Rd.), since gold prices have risen so much and technology is better. They say 80% of the gold is still in the ground. It's a hard sell, around here, as you might imagine. Besides, we're here, now. How much more gold do they need? (sorry)
So, our house is built with steel siding and corrugated metal roofing. Helps to give it that
industrial look. But we like it, as I said. Keeps it cool and it would be safer in case of fire, constantly on people's minds up here, as you might imagine. The "tower" in the middle is four stories, the lowest level of which is on the bedroom level. Then there's the entry level, where the front door is. Above that is a loft where Tom has his office. Above that is the library super-loft. It's very small and is accessible by a rolling library ladder. I hauled many of our books up there. It's very cute, if not that practical. So, it's interesting to us that we ended up in a theme house of the theme park. Perhaps it's because of our name.