Bowers Mansion
The Bowers Mansion is a mansion located between Reno and Carson City, Nevada. It was built in 1863 by Lemuel "Sandy" Bowers and his wife, Eilley Orrum Bowers, and is a prime example of the homes built in Nevada by the new millionaires of the Comstock Lode mining boom. History The land originally was purchased in 1856 by Eilley and her second husband Alex Cowan, who returned to Utah a year later with other Mormon settlers. Eilley secured a divorce and moved to Gold Hill where she ran a boarding house and took in washing. Some miners, unable to pay for lodging and laundry with cash, gave Eilley Orrum pieces of their mining claims in payment. Thus she acquired the mining claim which, together with that belonging to her third husband Sandy, became the source of their fortune. The mansion was the fulfillment of Eilley's dreams of prestige and respectability. The mansion, designed by J. Neely Johnson, a builder and ex-governor of California, combined Georgian Revival and Italianate architectural styles. It was modeled after a design conceived by Eilley based on her recollection of elegant buildings in her native Scotland. Indeed, the Bowers employed stonecutters from Scotland for the construction