After walking through the museum at Mormon Station, we crossed the street to Genoa’s History Museum next to the Pony Express station location and down the street from the state’s oldest bar. Genoa is the oldest of the 3 communities in Carson Valley: Gardnerville, Minden, and Genoa. We first saw some technology improvements that helped the city grow.
blacksmith’s tools
1st jail
These are the original cells used in Genoa from 1865 until 1916. The stove was added around 1900. The ball & chain, each 20 inches in circumference and weighing 33 pounds, weren’t for workouts but were used in the 1880s on the prisoners when they were allowed out of their cells for daily exercise.
The steel privy in the corner was used by the prisoners.
Description of what the jail had looked like before it became a museum.
1st courtroom
chairs for jurors 
desks for judge and lawyers
1st post office
1st Ferris wheel
Yes, you’re right; the first Ferris wheel is connected to Genoa, Nevada! The directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition were anticipating a failure on their part for the 1892 Exposition. Four years earlier the French had taken the world by storm at the Paris Exposition with the Eiffel Towel, an engineering wonder. Six months before the Chicago Fair, they had nothing to rival what the French had done. The director wanted something “unique, of the off-beat on a grandiose scale. We must have something, anything, that will make a publicity splash all over the world.”
A young man in the room, George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., had an idea. He had grown up around Genoa on a ranch and remembered seeing a huge undershot water wheel operating at a bridge on the Carson River. The wheel turned slowly in the river current, hoisting buckets of water to be dumped into a trough for the watering travel-weary horses and mules carrying supplies to a mining district south of Carson Valley. He may have dreamed of riding around on one of its buckets, and as an engineer (graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic School in Troy, NY, in civil engineering), he saw possibilities.
The challenge to outdo the Eiffel Tower was on.
When Ferris began excavating, the ground was frozen. As the men dug below the frost line, they struck quicksand! In order to inch each of his excavations down, Ferris had to sink a protective caisson ahead of it. When they hit bedrock and began pouring concrete, it froze because the temperature was at 0 degrees. Ferris brought a boiler and steam pipes to the site, sank the heated pipes as he poured concrete, and finally got solid footings.
The wheel began to take shape.
The 2 wheels both measured 250 feet in diameter.
How the Ferris wheel was powered.
passenger car stats:
- 36 passenger cars, each 24 feet long, 13 feet wide, and 10 feet high
- 38 fancy twisted steel chairs in each car
- each car was constructed of steel covered with wood veneer
- 5 plate-glass windows on each side of the car gave passengers a great view; windows were covered by an iron grill to prevent anyone from falling or jumping out
- 2 doors for each car serving as the entrance and exit
- full capacity – could carry 1440 people and weighed 1500 tons
Ferris wheel ran for 19 weeks during the fair, carried 1,453,611 paying customers, and grossed $726,8805.50. The wheel’s backers were financially rewarded, but Ferris never recovered from his overwhelming debt since he had pretty much borrowed to build the wheel.
To show how safe it was, Ferris and his wife took the first ride, along with guests and a 40-piece band. At night, the wheel was lit by 3000 incandescent lights; what a spectacular sight!
After the fair closed, the wheel was dismantled and re-erected at another site in Chicago where it ran at a profit for a number of years. Stoves were added in each car so rides could be taken during cold weather.
Ferris died at age 37 after a successful career in engineering, but he died in debt and without knowing that his wheel was dismantled after being used again at the St. Louis Exposition and duplicated in Paris for another exposition. But his legacy lives on.
George Washington Ferris’s family is part of the next post.
