Carson Mansion

William Carson came west from New Brunswick in the gold rush and found his fortune in redwood; with John Dolbeer he built one of the largest lumber firms on the coast. In 1884 he hired the San Francisco architects Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom to build him a house on the bluff above his own mill and wharves, and over two years they piled on everything a redwood fortune could buy: towers, gables, turned porches, layered shingle patterns, and inside, carved woods and onyx brought in from abroad.

The story everyone tells is that Carson built it to keep a hundred of his men working through a slump in the timber trade. It may be true, but it comes down as anecdote rather than record. What the record does show is that the Newsoms published a pattern book of house designs, Picturesque California Homes, the same year Carson hired them, and that the mansion set the tone for a generation of ornate Eureka building. The house across the street, the Pink Lady, followed in 1889, a wedding present for Carson's son.

The family kept the mansion until the 1940s. Since 1950 it has belonged to the Ingomar Club, a private club named for a theatre Carson built downtown, and it is not open to the public.

See it from the sidewalk at Second and M streets.