The Ongoing Quest for Documentation – photos, oral history, public documents

The basic question is “what are we building?”  This theme continues through the whole restoration project particularly with a building that has lost a lot of its historic detail.  We, fortunately, had perfect photo documentation.  The front view of the Hotel and an oblique view were shown in photos that we had acquired earlier.  The gold miners of the 1800’s are gone with little documentation but the people who replaced them have tracked and handed down their history through several generations. Eldora is rich is photo documentation and we were the beneficiary of it. In future projects, we had the benefit of oral history and conversations with people who lived here during the later construction of the Social Room but for the front porch we had two photos and it was those photos that guided our work. 

The detailed photos that we took for the first grant show the deteriorated condition of the front of the Hotel but particularly the porch. Fortunately, there was enough original material to use as a template for the milling of new wood that matched the original. We also happened to find that the original lumber yard that had made the original trim detail was still in business. More on that later.  For this first project, the answer to “what are we building” was easy to find.  People take photos of the important sides of buildings; the sides facing the streets usually.  Later parts of this restoration on the non-street sides became more difficult.