Construction layers of this original homestead tell much of Nevada City’s “boom and bust” history. In 1864, miner Frank Finney and his bride, Mary, moved into a cabin on this property that had been constructed the previous year. The cabin forms the core of the present house. The newlyweds soon added the front room, decorating the log walls and ceilings with muslin stretched smooth to mimic plastered walls, then applying wallpaper over the muslin. Clapboard siding covered the rough exterior log walls in the front, and by the end of the 1860s, the house had a second story, some gingerbread trim, and a picket fence. A well provided water for laundry and a nearby spring supplied their drinking water. The Finneys used a fireplace until they could afford a woodstove, then they blocked the chimney. The couple’s four children, three of whom survived to adulthood, were born in the house. Another abandoned miner’s cabin to the north became the Finneys’ summer kitchen. A yearly coat of whitewash in the kitchen grew to be inches thick. The Finneys kept milk cows and Mary made butter and cheese, the best in the region. The Finney family lived here continuously from 1864 until the 1950s when daughter Cora Finney was Nevada City’s last resident. Unlike their neighbors who moved on, the Finneys stayed and adapted what their neighbors left to their own uses, helping to preserve a sampling of the local building traditions and structural forms of the original mining camp.
]]>Light timber framing with board-and-batten walls characterizes this early home original to the Nevada City townsite. Inside, the original, well-preserved, muslin-covered walls are a rare example of a frontier decorating technique. The cabin’s first occupants were Dr. Don Byam and his family, who came to Alder Gulch in 1863 after someone jumped their claim near Bannack. Elected judge of the miner’s court, Dr. Byam presided over the murder trial of George Ives, held on Nevada City’s main street in December 1863. Ives, convicted and hanged, was incarcerated during the trial in the small cabin behind the house. The trial was the catalyst for forming the Vigilantes. During the Civil War in Confederate-dominated Alder Gulch, Dr. Byam was a member of the anti-Confederate Union League of America. Clandestine meetings were held in the Byam attic. The Byams moved on and Samuel B. Wonderly next owned the house. He removed the original false front and added the gable as camp phase architecture gave way to the settlement period. Lawrence Fenner and his wife Amanda moved into the house in 1875. They remained in Nevada City long after almost everyone else had moved away. Fenner, a Union League activist and self-styled Vigilante like Dr. Byam, was a civil engineer and inventor. He obtained the US Mineral Patent on the Nevada City townsite in 1878 and was the first to dredge in the area using a method he invented. After Fenner died in 1915, Amanda stayed on and died here in 1930 at 84.
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