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Miss Tahoe was built in 1939. She is the boat the museum uses to give rides to members. Note the mother-in-law seat behind the compartment for the Scripps 12 cylinder 316 horsepower engine. photo by Grant Barta/Moonshine Ink |
Comments (1)From Native People to Millionaires, Timbermen to Tourists
This month Tahoe's maritime history finds a new home
Published: May 7, 2008by Terray Sylvester
The Maritime Museum’s new abode in Homewood with the finishing touches in progress. Opening day party: May 24.
photo by Grant Barta/Moonshine Ink
The Shanghai was raised from the depths after many decades below the waves. Now she’s in the new Maritime Museum.
photo by Grant Barta/Moonshine Ink
Click on images for slideshow
The story is incomplete – made mostly of antique newsprint in such papers as the Truckee Republican and San Francisco’s Daily California Chronicle – but if historians have pieced it together correctly 1856 was the year the first recorded boat made by European hands touched the waters of Lake Tahoe.
A lot has changed since then. Residents of Meeks Bay no longer raise cattle and row their butter to market in Glenbrook, and the waves of Glenbrook Bay don’t slosh muddily against timber barges unloading their cargo in the clamor of sawmills far below the Comstock flume. Public transportation has taken a big step backwards, at least in terms of class. These days, it doesn’t pay to offer mahogany-paneled staterooms, meals, and a voyage on a slender 168-foot ship powered by cordwood and steam. In the current century, the easiest put-in for your boat is no longer the narrow gauge train from Truckee, and even the unmistakable roar of the Gold Cup hydroplanes has faded from the basin, drowned out by jet-skis, fiberglass, and the year-round flow of commerce that now does not turn to the lake for the simplest means of movement.
For decades, residents and visitors have caught only glimpses of these contrasts – maybe in the fast form of a woody coursing across the water, in the ink of a library book, or in a wreck lying in the blued-out depths of an underwater photo – but on May 24 the Tahoe Maritime Museum will open the doors of its new residence in Homewood, and those of us around today will be given a freshly polished lens through which to view our relationship with the basin.
“There’s some incredible history here,” said Museum Executive Director Bill Kraus.
The new building has been designed to show it off. On the ground floor of the 5,800 square-foot facility visitors will find a pier with a handful of vessels moored alongside it, though no water laps beneath the hulls – lakefront real estate can be hard to come by. Eventually, staff will begin cycling through the two dozen vessels in the museum’s collection, but on opening day the main floor will display five boats and 20 of the museum’s antique outboard motors, as well as a variety of other items from the collection. Attractions will include Godfather, a 26-foot runabout powered by a surplus Curtiss OX-5 airplane motor, and Vent d’Ete, a gaff-rigged sailboat with a lapstrake hull. Built in 1922, Godfather is the oldest known Chris-Craft in existence. Vent d’Ete was first sailed on Tahoe in 1930.
The upper level of the new facility extends only halfway over the main floor. Leaning against the railing folks will be able to peer down into the engine compartments of the boats, and take an eye-level look at the two hydroplanes suspended in race formation from the ceiling. The balcony also houses the remains of Shanghai, a launch likely built in the 1890s and originally powered by steam. She’s the oldest boat in the collection.
The east wall of the upper level will offer a timeline of local maritime history from the days before Europeans arrived to the present. According to spokeswoman Nicole Cheslock, museum staff intends to offer information on Washo history, though the museum as a whole will generally focus on the European side of Tahoe’s story.
The Founding of the Museum
The 5,800-foot facility in Homewood may be new, but the motivation behind it has been around for at least 20 years. The idea for a maritime museum grew out of a conversation that took place on a back porch in Tahoma somewhere in the 1980s. The exact date varies depending on who you talk to, but the participants are well known. In attendance were Dick Clarke, Buzz Gibb, Alan Furth, Steven Lapkin and the owner of the porch, Eric Schmidt.
“At the time, the five of us had particular focus,” reminisced Lapkin. “It was a strong group of guys of particular accomplishment.”
The “accomplishment” Lapkin referred to was of the nautical variety and it focused particularly on the wooden powerboats built by GarWood, Chris-Craft, Riva and other manufacturers. Dick Clarke was a talented mechanic who began working in Tahoe after World War II and eventually became manager of the Sierra Boat Company. While there he poured his energy into restoring wooden boats. Gibb and Lapkin credit him with making Lake Tahoe the wooden boat scene it eventually became.
“He knew more about wooden boats than anybody,” said Buzz Gibb.
Gibb himself had visited the basin as early as 1939, but didn’t develop an attachment to the area until he bought a Chris-Craft in the 1970s. The salesmen had to show him how to start the engine, but that boat “really sparked an interest in Lake Tahoe,” said Gibb, and he went on to own various businesses in the area.
In the 1980s, Alan Furth was working as vice chairman and a director of the Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corporation, but his passion was wooden boats.
“Mr. Furth at the time had the largest private collection of runabouts anywhere in the country,” said Lapkin. The size of Furth’s collection, at its zenith, reportedly approached the 70-boat mark.
“I don’t think he knew how many boats he had,” Van Etten said. “He had just barns full of them.”
Lapkin himself has been organizing Tahoe’s annual wooden boat show, the Concours d’Elegance, for more than 30 years.
The museum was registered as a non-profit organization in 1987, but after that it “languished” according to Lapkin.
“We stammered, there were no baby steps yet,” he said.
Over the next 14 years the museum shifted homes from an office above Obexer’s Country Store in Homewood to two different sheds in Sugar Pine Point State Park. The collection gradually grew from a binder of notes to an assortment of periodicals, fishing tackle, and other donated odds and ends until, in 2000, the museum helped recover Shanghai from 300 feet of water near Homewood. She became the first boat in the collection.
In 2001, the museum acquired land of its own by purchasing the Homeside Motel in Homewood. About the time Shanghai arrived topside, other boats and engines began entering the collection, and in 2007 the Homeside was demolished to make way for the new building.
“I never believed they’d ever get it built but then they got the right people in,” Gibb said. “I give ‘em credit that they did it.”
As Lapkin put it, all of the founders but himself have, “unfortunately… already left us. Either they’ve gone upward or they’ve gone east.” The original idea had been theirs, but implementing it required other hands. According to Lapkin, one indispensable set belongs to Board President Tom Bredt.
“What we see is really his doing with the actual founders ourselves applauding,” Lapkin said.
And volunteers have played an indispensable role as well. The museum hired its first staff around roughly eight years ago, when it took Van Etten aboard as historian. Much of the fundraising work was accomplished by unpaid hands.
“What the people on the board and the staff here have done is incredible,” said Bill Kraus, in reference to the nearly $4 million they drummed up in a little over a year.
Not Just Fancy Boats
The main floor will be filled with polished mahogany, but museum staff members say the new facility will offer broader insights into the history of the Tahoe region. According to Executive Director Bill Kraus, the first exhibit will be designed toward that end.
“Looking at maritime history through the decades and how it relates to the general socioeconomic history of this area is going to be the main theme as we open up,” said Kraus.
He and museum spokeswoman Nicole Cheslock mentioned the hay and other agricultural products transported on the lake through the turn of the century; the logging that swelled with the Virginia City silver strike and continued until even the steamer ships were having trouble finding fuel; and the many wrecks on Tahoe’s floor that attest to its former importance as a means of transportation. As Kraus sees it, the revamped museum is designed to create the “ah-hah” moments in people, the moments when they draw connections between their everyday lives, the history of the lake and, if possible, the greater history of the world as well. He thinks the museum can also give such moments to those who aren’t boating buffs or may not be all that interested in local lore. After all, Kraus explained, it’s all related; the physics of sails and propellers can be tied to the forces that bank a curve ball, echoes of the 11th century Norman invasions of Britain linger in the lapstrake planking of Vent d’Ete, and a lesson in industrial design can be taken from the 11 decades of outboard motors in the museum’s warehouse.
But staff say the new million dollar roofline will not only serve the museum’s purposes, but the wider interests of the community as well. A sizeable portion of the lower level has been left open as community space. According to Cheslock, this area will be used for lectures on boat restoration and maritime history, but might also be opened up for other events such as weekend après ski movies on a Tahoe theme. After all, Homewood Mountain Resort sits right next door.
The Tahoe Maritime Museum Grand Opening
The Tahoe Maritime Museum will open the doors of its new facility at 11 a.m. on May 24. The festivities will include free admission, activities for the whole family, and guided tours.
Where: 5205 West Lake Boulevard, Homewood
Information: 530-525-9253; TahoeMaritimeMuseum.org
Get involved
Are you a museum member, a boating buff, or just looking for volunteer experience? The Maritime Museum is looking for docents and the training day is May 10. Individual training available too.
Maritime Museum Charts Course
Toward the Schools
Did you know that boat hulls were once lugged into the basin behind teams of oxen? Or that in the 1900s California Fish and Game claimed to have released kokanee salmon into the lake “by accident”?
Better brush up, or by this time next year your child might know more maritime history than you; the folks behind the scenes at the Tahoe Maritime Museum are gearing up to work with local schools. Several classes from Truckee Elementary will be visiting the new Homewood facility this spring, and the museum will man a booth at the upcoming SWEP youth symposium on May 16. Museum staff says other collaboration with the schools might take the form of service learning projects, internships, and building boats from kits.
But the museum’s most significant contribution to local education could take place within the classrooms themselves. Currently, museum staff members are putting together a maritime curriculum intended for the third-grade students. Under California standards, third-graders are required to study local history anyway, so the supplement from the museum will fill a ready-made niche.
“Once people hear a little bit about what we’re doing it really sparks a lot interest,” said David Smith, the organizer of the schools program. “(Teachers and administrators) are really getting a lot more excited to come down. They’re seeing different ways they can utilize the museum for the students. It’s pretty cool.”
In order to entice a range of classes to the museum, museum staff has drawn up connections between maritime history and a variety of portions of Tahoe’s past. For example, Smith and the museum’s education and outreach director, Nicole Cheslock, traveled to Minden to learn about Washo activity on Tahoe waterways first hand.
“That’s where most of the information on the Washoes actually came from that we’re using,” Smith said.
In coming years museum staff hopes to expand their education program through the grades.
Opening Day at the Lake
In the mood for a two-hour trip in a 1939 GarWood runabout? From May 23 to 26 the Tahoe West Shore Association will host its second annual “Opening Day at the Lake.” The festivities will stretch from Fanny Bridge to Emerald Bay, and will include live music, a west shore clean-up, low-flying sea planes and more. And of course, the Maritime Museum will be opening that weekend as well. Participating businesses and venues will give out treats such as slices of Hula Pie, two-for-one kayak rentals and free tours of Vikingsholm. There will be a raffle as well, offering prizes such as the ride on the Maritime Museum’s Miss Tahoe, a private 10-person tour of the Ehrman Mansion at Sugar Pine Point and dinner for four at Pisano’s Pizza.
To be eligible for the raffle and other goodies, pick up one of the West Shore Association’s “passports” and stop by a participating business to get it stamped for free. Earn 10 stamps for the handouts, 15 to get into the raffle.
tahoewestshoreassoc.com; 530-525-0400
See our story, Nautical Lore, that paints the colorful history of boats on Lake Tahoe.
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