Arnold R. Trimmer: A Contribution to a Survey of Life in Carson Valley from First Settlement through the 1950s

Interviewee: Arnold R. Trimmer and Laurie Hickey
Interviewed: 1984
Published: 1984
Interviewer: R. T. King
UNOHP Catalog #129

During the winter and spring of 1982, Kathryn Totton guided Arnold Trimmer through an oral autobiography for the University of Nevada Oral History Program. The result was an impressively detailed work over five hundred pages in length containing much valuable information about life in Genoa, Nevada.

When the Oral History Program took up another research project in Carson Valley in 1984, Mr. Trimmer, who had lived in the valley since 1909, was reinterviewed. In this volume, Trimmer focuses on three topics: the family and ranch of Emmanuel Laverone, an Italian immigrant who homesteaded in the southern Carson Valley in the late nineteenth century; the Hansen and Park Sawmill, which was the last of the small steam-driven mills to operate out of any of the canyons above Carson Valley; Indians, blacks and Chinese living in Carson Valley through the 1930s.

Two appendices relating to the Hansen and Park Sawmill are attached to the text of the interview. In the first, Laurie Hickey, a distant relation to the mill’s owners, passes on family history about the sawmill and its operation. The second appendix is a compendium of documentary information which pieced together the mill’s name, location and approximate dates of operation which had been fixed through oral history and archaeological investigation. A videotaped documentary on this research is available through the University of Nevada Oral History Program.

This introduction and oral history is reprinted with permission from the University of Nevada Oral History Archive, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Nevada, Reno.