On your right, look for the towering, multi-story wooden mansion with a striking central steeple roof and an ornate wrap-around porch painted in dark green and cream. Just three minutes ago we admired the Carter House Inn, which was actually designed by the very same architects who created this jaw-dropping masterpiece. This is the Carson Mansion, often called the most grand Victorian home in America. It looks like a baronial castle made entirely of redwood. It was built for the lumber baron we met earlier, William Carson. You might expect the guy who built this to be a massive show-off his whole life. But he actually lived a surprisingly quiet, unassuming life for decades. He did not even marry until he was thirty-eight, and he raised his four kids in a totally modest, simple two-story house right across the street from his lumber mill. So why did he suddenly build this sprawling, wildly extravagant palace in 1884? Well, here is the incredible twist. In 1884, the timber industry crashed into a severe economic slump. Mills were shutting down everywhere. Instead of laying off his loyal mill workers and carpenters, Carson commissioned this massive residential project specifically to keep over one hundred of his men employed. He used his seemingly unlimited budget and global shipping network to create an ultimate make-work project. To keep those skilled hands busy, he did not just use local redwood. He shipped in ninety-seven thousand feet of primavera, which is a pale, beautiful wood often called white mahogany, straight from Central America. He brought in Mexican onyx and rare woods from the Philippines. It took his crew over two years of painstaking, three-dimensional carving to finish it. Out of a brutal financial bust, they crafted an absolute explosion of Gilded Age opulence. The design is mostly Queen Anne style, which means it has an asymmetrical, highly decorative look with a lively roofscape and a mix of completely different textures. Carson supposedly said that if he built it poorly, people would call him a miser, and if he built it expensively, they would call him a show-off, so he just built it to suit himself. Today, it is owned by a private group called the Ingomar Club. For decades, it was a strict men-only establishment. That all crashed to a halt in 1974 when Ellen Stern Harris, the vice chairman of the California Coastal Commission, was flat-out denied entry at the door during a tour. She did not back down. Her refusal to be turned away sparked a four-year legal battle that finally forced the club to open its doors to women for civic and business functions. It is amazing to think how this monument of extreme wealth was actually born out of a desperate effort to save working-class jobs. Now, let us leave the grandest, most elaborate mansion in Eureka and head toward one of the humblest, oldest surviving homes in the city, the George McFarlan House, which is just a seven-minute walk away.
