February 16, 1998

Keeping past alive in El Dorado County

Staff writer

Vintage railroad cars rest in the yard outside her Smith Flat home. Inside her house, books detailing the history of the county fill wall shelves and rest atop antique bureaus, stacks of old newspapers sit on a desktop, and index cards stuff an antique filing cabinet next to the fireplace. Photographs and prints of El Dorado's past line the walls of the home.

BEV COLA SITS INSIDE a railroad dining car at the El Dorado County Historical Museum, above. Cola was instrumental in acquiring the historical rail car for the enjoyment of museum visitors.

Since 1973, when she was one of five museum commission members appointed by the county Board of Supervisors, Bev Cola has been working at the El Dorado County Museum next to the fairground.

A favored project at the museum, where she performs research and helps people with genealogy searches, is the restoration of Cal-Door's Shay locomotive No. 4, built in 1907.

The locomotive pulled a narrow-gauge train from Caldor - a lumber mill with company housing and a store several miles south of Grizzly Flat - to the company lumberyard in Diamond Springs, where the wood could be transferred to the Southern Pacific.

When the Caldor complex near Grizzly Flat burned down in 1923, the Shay was taken to the new mill site on Missouri Flat Road, where it operated in the lumberyard.

The locomotive was given to the people of El Dorado County in 1954, and displayed outside the museum for nearly half a century. Four years ago Brook Rather, a railroad buff from Georgetown who designed and built two vintage passenger cars and a caboose used on the "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" television series, recommended to the museum commission that the locomotive be restored.

The restoration is now under way thanks to Cola, who underwrote the $25,000 cost. Cola hopes at some point in the near future that a restored train, made up in part by the cars in her yard, will run on an as-yet undetermined length of track somewhere in the Placerville-Camino area.

Cola's lifelong interest in trains started in 1939 when she and her father, Chet Carver, a building contractor who built Cash Mercantile and the first Raley's store in Placerville, rode the Michigan-Cal Lumber Company's cable car which connected two narrow-gauge rail lines on opposite sides of the American River. And Cola lived in a house just west of Smith Flat House, which was built of timbers salvaged from a railroad trestle nearby.

Cola's husband, Joe, who spent much of his boyhood in the logging camps supervised by his father, was employed for a time as an electrical contractor for Michigan-Cal working on locomotives. He shared Cola's enthusiasm for railroads.

"We always stopped at whatever railroad we encountered in our travels," Cola says.

Both Cola and Joe's roots in the county grow deep. Joe's great-grandfather, Napoleon Lombardo, came here in 1856, homesteading a place two miles from Smith Flat and building a stone house that today is Boeger Winery.

Joe's maternal grandparents, Sarah and Nicola Fossati, bought the Smith Flat House in 1878 when it was a 25-by-50 foot, two-story building with a full basement. In 1892 a saloon and wardroom were added on downstairs while bedrooms were added to the upper level.

The Smith Flat House has contained over the years a post office, the saloon and card room, a dining room, grocery store and gas station. The bar from the main floor saloon is now in the basement of Smith Flat House. Joe's father and a partner named Stivers owned the Palace Saloon in Georgetown in 1910 and 1911.

Cola's maternal grandparents, Henry and "Grandma" Jackson came across the plains in 1861 and homesteaded 160 acres on Calvine Road (then Tokay Lane, named for the grapes grown in the area south of Sacramento between Elk Grove and Florin). Her father's parents, E.R. and Lydia Carver, came from Illinois in the early 1920s. Voicing some uncertainty about the Illinois origins of her dad's family, Cola chuckles, saying "I help everyone else trace their family's roots, but I never get around to digging up my own."

Cola's family was living in Coloma in 1921, but she was born in the Calvine Road House, where her mother was born. Cola attended "grammar" school in a one room schoolhouse in Coloma, a schoolhouse now fully restored and used as a demonstration classroom where teachers dress in period costumes.

Cola recalls how the schoolhouse restoration was almost completed in 1985, when a logging truck failed to "make the turn, seriously damaging" the building and setting back the project. She graduated from El Dorado High School in 1939, then worked during the war years in the molding mill at Placerville Lumber Company at Smith Flat. She recalls being offered a better job in Sacramento at the time but not being able to leave her job at the mill because of the importance of wood products to the war effort.

In 1946, Cola went to work for the county assessor's office, when the population of the county was 13,500 and worked for the assessor for 30 years, retiring as office manager. For the last 12 years Cola has worked with the area children's centers, appearing every April as the Easter Bunny.

Commenting on how Placerville has changed over the years, Cola remembers the difficulty returning to her work at the assessor's office after having lunch in town.

"Everybody knew everybody then and people wanted to say hello and talk. Today when I go to town, I don't know anyone," she says.

Cola relates how parking was different years ago, when cars on Main Street parked at an angle to the sidewalk rather than parallel to it. Across from the Bell Tower the sidewalk extended into the street, narrowing the street to one lane, a situation that often resulted in traffic jams. The O'Donnell house, a private residence, sitting behind a white picket fence, was torn down in the 1930s to build a downtown parking lot.

Back then the tourists were different too, she says. They came to the mountains for prolonged stays, not just for the weekend or a day's skiing. They lingered in Placerville then, eating at the Blue Bell Cafe, where the Bookery is today, or the coffee shop at Raffle's Hotel, today's Cary House.

As for what young women did in Placerville in the late thirties, Cola says, smiling mischievously, "We entertained the boys." Eight boys and four girls were living in Smith Flat at the time, and Cola tells how they used to roller skate down Placerville's Main Street. Cola also mentions the dances that were held in Diamond Springs and Placerville, where regional musicians like Bunny Crites would bring their bands.

From her girlhood in Coloma, Cola remembers her fascination with the man who had a hook for a hand and ran the post office. And she remembers a summer night when she and her friend Helen Gallagher, whose family owned a fruit ranch near the Coloma Bridge, stole a watermelon. The girls rolled the melon, which was "too big to carry" across the bridge and up the road to the schoolhouse steps where they broke open and ate the stolen fruit.

Shaking her head and laughing, Cola also remembers an early "personal ad" that appeared in the Mountain Democrat sometime in the '30s. A man living in Smith Flat placed the ad, which promised to pay money for "a woman for the weekend." Cola says she and her sister kidded their mother for years following the appearance of the ad, asking their mom if she was interested in making some extra money.

Much of Cola's present energy and time is spent preserving the past of El Dorado County. And most likely, thanks to Cola's efforts, the county's future will include the sight and sounds of a restored Shay locomotive, pulling vintage cars and chugging up and down a narrow-gauge rail line somewhere near Placerville.