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Description
Photograph depicting stage coach with horses outside the main building of Lick Observatory. The 25-foot dome is visible on the left. Stenciled on the side of the carriage: "Mount Hamilton Stage Co.; U.S. Mail; Lick Observatory." Handwritten on verso of photograph: "Stage coach at Mt. Hamilton." The Lick Observatory building was designed by architect S.E. Todd of Washington, DC, in the Italian Renaissance style with the use of deep entablatures and moldings, and a pediment over the west door. The construction of the Lick Observatory building began in January 1880 under the direction of Thomas Fraser, James Lick's agent. To level the top of Mount Hamilton, Fraser had the top thirty feet of the mountain removed with black powder explosives. Workers then moved, by hand, an estimated 40 thousand tons of rock they had loosened. Masons built a kiln next to a clay bed near the summit and fired the bricks for the building. All of the heavy materials for the dome and telescope mounting were hauled up the mountain by wagon team and lifted into place with simple mechanical aids. http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/butowsky5/astro4b.htm Appears to be a version of the image in the SJPL digital collection, "Mount Hamilton Stage at Lick Observatory." See http://digital.sjlibrary.org/u?/arbuckle,775 Scanned with Microtek Scanmaker 1000XL Pro; as a 600 dpi TIFF image in 8-bit Grayscale. Auto Level image processing applied and compressed into JPEG format using Photoshop CS3.
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