On Nov. 11, 2021, a formal dedication ceremony is scheduled for Veterans’ Day on High Street in Truckee to acknowledge and celebrate the acceptance and approval of the town’s Veterans Memorial Building and the adjacent Rocking Stone Tower for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. This important designation will be formally recognized with the placement of a plaque at the site. The National Park Services’ National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation.
The application process for the National Register was a monumental undertaking that took dedicated members of Truckee Donner Historical Society five years of extensive research to complete.
According to Truckee Donner Historical Society president Greg Zirbel, efforts to protect the Veterans Hall began in 2012 when Truckee-Donner Recreation & Park District decided to sell the structure to a church. Many community members were against the sale and packed a townhall meeting to express their desire to keep the facility for public use. Their voices convinced the district to cancel the pending sale. Zirbel and others established a Friends of the Vets Hall group and posted it on Facebook. Core members of the historical society held fundraisers, mounted veteran display items on the walls and re-established the original American Legion CA Post 439 after an 18-year hiatus.
National Register of Historic Places dedication
Nov. 11 | Noon | Veterans Memorial lawn
The application process for the National Register was a monumental undertaking that took dedicated members of the historical society five years of extensive research to complete. Acceptance provides formal recognition of a property’s historical, architectural or archeological significance based on national standards. The certification also offers possible state tax benefits and grant opportunities for preservation. The Veterans Hall and Rocking Stone Tower join other nearby National Register sites, including the Kruger (White) House in Brickelltown, Truckee’s Commercial Row-Brickelltown District, Boca Dam and the Donner Camp sites.
Truckee’s beginnings
Truckee was first settled by Euro-Americans in the early 1860s when pioneer Joseph Gray erected Gray’s Toll Station along the Truckee River in order to serve Comstock freight traffic using the Dutch Flat Donner Lake Wagon Road. The road was built by Central Pacific Railroad as a toll road while it pushed construction of its railroad over the Sierra.
But for thousands of years before that, Native Americans summered in the area, relying on mountain game and the life-sustaining Truckee River as a vital resource for survival. During the warm, snow-free months, they hunted, fished and foraged for berries and medicinal plants along its banks. The Washoe Tribe called Truckee River “a’wakhu wa’t’a” and the current townsite was an important tribal village.
The name Truckee is associated with a friendly Paiute Indian chief who aided early travelers and explorers with directions and guidance. The name was applied to the river in the 1840s and the town took on the moniker when the railroad came through more than 150 years ago in 1868.
Veterans Memorial Building
The Veterans Memorial Building, dedicated to World War I soldiers from Truckee, was completed in 1939. The building was designed by George Clinton Sellon, California’s first state architect appointed by Governor James Gillett in 1907. It is a two-story, Gothic-arched structure and the only one of this style designed by Sellon.
Over several decades, Sellon’s architectural work became well known and admired by the public in the Golden State. Like the newly certified Veterans Memorial Building, an impressive number of his structures are on the National Register of Historic Places. He conceived the plans for many historic buildings still standing including Nevada City’s City Hall, Lassen County Courthouse, San Quentin Prison, Auburn’s City Hall and Firehouse, as well as a plethora of San Jose State University structures. Sellon also designed the original Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee built in the 1950s.
Crystal Palace
The Veterans Memorial Building is built on the foundation of the former mansion of Charles F. McGlashan, one of Truckee’s most accomplished and influential early residents. An author, teacher, lawyer, politician and newspaper publisher, he is also credited with the establishment of Truckee’s winter sports industry at the turn of the 20th Century. McGlashan called his home on the hill the Crystal Palace as it sparkled over downtown when lit at night. An open-air, elevated walkway led from the main house to a cylindrical museum tower McGlashan constructed on top of the large boulder that holds the Rocking Stone.
Rocking Stone
McGlashan’s Rocking Stone Tower Museum housed his remarkable wood and glass-framed butterfly collection — he was an internationally respected entomologist — as well as Donner Party relics, which he recovered from the campsites at Donner Lake. McGlashan interviewed survivors from that tragic event and published the first authoritative book on the subject. McGlashan died in 1931 and the mansion burned in 1935. Afterwards his family donated the land to the town of Truckee. The granite block retaining walls that the McGlashan house stood on remain today, as do the metal poles and roof that supported the two-story tower around the Rocking Stone, the remains of McGlashan’s museum.
The Rocking Stone Tower showcases a large, 30-foot-tall, flat-topped rock with a 17-ton boulder balanced on top, a glacial erratic that once could wobble at the touch of a hand or strong breeze. A delicately balanced rock like this specimen is rare — there are only 25 known in the world. It is still there, but now fixed in place with cement at its base for safety. Today, a metal staircase leads to this unusual geological feature.
The Rocking Stone rests on the smooth base-rock, its level surface polished by glacier action or perhaps chipped by Native Americans. The Washoe dried fish and game meat on top of the large, partially buried boulder. Animals and rodents couldn’t climb the steep sides of the supporting rock and the stone’s occasional tremble frightened birds.
Curiously the surface of the supporting boulder has a one-half-inch to the foot slant in a northeasterly direction. Over his many years living in Truckee, McGlashan never observed snow build up on the otherwise flat-topped boulder. It has not been proven, but he suspected that Indians may have chiseled the surface to produce this unusual effect. When he built his cylindrical tower, he incorporated that same angle to the roof and ultimately did the same for his mansion.
McGlashan’s granddaughter, Nona, wrote, “Hundreds of small flint arrowheads lay about the base of the big rock when I was a child. To me it is more conceivable that the flat floor of the big rock was scraped and smoothed by tools; although a glacier’s ice blade could have done it, I concede.”
The historic Rocking Stone offers a birds-eye view overlooking downtown Truckee. In the distance the extinct volcano Mount Rose (10,785 feet) and the Carson Range rise prominently. At sunset, the Carson Range is often painted pink, purple and red in a soothing alpenglow. | truckeehistory.org
