What is up there

The complex is a yard of buildings, not a single museum, and most of them were moved to the knoll rather than built on it.

The Webster School House went up in 1882, put together by Markleeville residents — a carpenter named Louis Monroe leading the volunteers, and a mason, Hank Matthews, laying the stone platform the wood stove stood on. Classes started in October 1883 for children of five to seven. It ran forty years, and in between lessons it was where the town held its dances, dinners and plays. It closed in 1929 when the New Webster School opened — the building that is the county library now.

The Old Log Jail is the odder one. Its two iron cells were bought in 1867 for Silver Mountain City, up Loope Canyon. When Silver Mountain went to ghost town the cells came down the hill to Markleeville, and in October 1876 a jail was built around them: vertical logs fitted into a slot, corner joints pinned with wood, board-and-batten siding. You can walk into one of the cells.

There is also a stamp mill, a Basque bread oven, a blacksmith exhibit and a yard of antique machinery — the working equipment of a county that ran on silver, then sheep, then not much at all.

Jacob Markley

The town is named for a man who owned it for about twenty months.

Markley came to the United States from Canada in the late 1830s, went to Virginia as a youth, then Wisconsin in 1840, then Minnesota. He married, had three children, and in the late 1840s left them behind for Sacramento and the gold rush. His brothers followed; they started a meat company together.

On September 12, 1861 he staked a hundred and sixty acres beside the river, built a crude toll bridge, and charged the traffic bound for the Silver Mountain mines to cross it. Then he divided the land into lots and sold homesites.

On May 14, 1863 a friend named Henry W. Tuttle shot him in an argument over the profits from those sales. Tuttle was acquitted on grounds of self-defence. Markley is buried on a hill above the town; the exact spot is not known.

The town took his name anyway. California incorporated it in April 1864, and in 1875 Markleeville became the county seat.

Going

The complex is on the knoll above Markleeville, five minutes from the resort gate. It is seasonal, and the county keeps the current days and hours — check before you drive over.

The silver that built all of this — and lost it again — is in Silver Fever. The bridge Markley built is a mile downstream of the cabins, and it has a different name now: Hangman's Bridge.