Our “Tea & Bustles” Event Featured on KOLO-TV

Posted on by Director
KOLO-TV in Reno recently featured our upcoming Tea & Bustles Victorian tea party and educational fashion show. ABC 8's Denise Wong interviewed Nora Stefu, our Museum's Executive Director, about the event which will take place at the Museum on the Saturday of Mother's Day Weekend. The educational fashion show will be presented by Liza McIlwee, a Victorian Era Fashion and Virginia City historian. Her popular Instagram, Eras of Enchantment, delights fans of Victoriana with Liza's i...
Read More

“Sarah Winnemucca: The Life of A Paiute” Video Series

Posted on by Director
The first series produced by the Historic Fourth Ward School Museum's "Last One Standing Studios" tells the dynamic story of the life of Sarah Winnemucca. Sarah was a Pauite woman who lived in Virginia City during the town's formative years and later became an author and activist. This three-part animated video series is based on Sarah's own autobiography, which is a seminal document of Nevada and Indigenous American history. Her “Life Among the Paiutes” is the first published au...
Read More

Swing Dance on the Comstock: What Was Dancing Life for Kids on the Comstock in the Heydey of Swing?

Posted on by Taylor Hamby
by Taylor Hamby Just as the doors of the Fourth Ward School in Virginia City closed as a schoolhouse in 1936, a new door was swinging open for youngsters all across America: swing dance! Whether you did “Swing”, “the Jitterbug”, “Lindy Hop”, “Balboa” “Jive” or “Shag”; if you were a teenager or young adult in the mid-1930s through the 1940s, swing was the thing! While there were many regional and musical variations of this then-emerging dance style, each were often upbeat and relatively i...
Read More

Black History & Women’s History in Virginia City

Posted on by Director
In honor of Black History Month and as a lead into Women's History Monthin March, we'd like to recognize the black women and girls who were members of the Storey County community and identified in the 1870 and1880 U.S. censuses.  Each of the women were certainly striving to make aliving in the mining community and care for their families.  It shouldalso be noted that some of the women may have been enslaved just a shorttime before the 1870 census. In the 1870 census, thirty-two bla...
Read More