Places
Copper King Mansion and William A. Clark
William A. Clark built the 34-room Copper King Mansion in Butte, Montana between 1884 and 1889. It was situated in what was called Uptown and was reported to have nine fireplaces imported from France, ninety doors, and six-hundred and thirty-nine windowpanes. In addition, there was a grand staircase, known as the “Staircase of All Nations”…
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Château de Rambouillet, the Estate, and its History
The Château de Rambouillet also known in English as the Castle of Rambouillet, is a château in the town of Rambouillet in northern France about 31 miles southwest of Paris. It was originally a fortified manor that dates to 1368. King Francis I died there in 1547 and during the reign of Louis XVIII it…
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Virginia City: An American Silver Mining Boomtown
Virginia City developed as a boomtown after the January discovery in 1859 of the first major U.S. silver ore deposit known as the Comstock Lode.* Located in Storey County in the state of Nevada, the population reached around 25,000 in the mid-1870s and then declined after 1878. In addition, some people consider Virginia City to…
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Hell on Wheels: Temporary Cities of the Transcontinental Railroad
“Hell on Wheels” was an itinerant tent city that included a collection of gambling houses, dance halls, saloons, and brothels that moved from place to place in the 1860s as it followed the army of Union Pacific railroad workers who were constructing the First Transcontinental Railroad in North America. It also formed mushrooming municipalities and…
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Fonthill Castle: Edwin Forrest’s Country Estate
Fonthill Castle was built in 1852 in The Bronx borough of New York City by prominent American Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest and his wife Catherine Norton Sinclair. According to American actor Lawrence Barrett, the architectural designs used to build Fonthill Castle came from the ideas generated by Sinclair and were then approved by Forrest. However,…
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Chateau de Saint-Cloud in the 1700s and 1800s
The Chateau de Saint-Cloud was built on a woody hill that overlooked the left bank of the Seine River about three miles west of Paris. It had been expanded by Phillipe of France, Duke of Orléans in the seventeen century and was in the hands of the Orléans family until protracted negotiations were undertaken by…
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Buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery: 15 Famous Eighteenth- and Nineteen-century People
There are many people buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. However, this post provides a list of fifteen famous people buried there that made a mark on French history in the 1700 or 1800s. Among them are Peter Abelard, Hubertine Auclert, Paul Barras, Sophie Blanchard, Sophie de Condorcet, Benjamin Constant, George Cuvier, Jacques-Louis David,…
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