HK5corner Hidden Gems: Shasta Napkin
I am starting a new series of posts to share some of the items we brought back to HK5corner after the remodel completed. And some of these items that are new to our home. I decided to kick off this series by choosing an item in our master bathroom, which came from my parents home. Pictured is a framed napkin. Yes, we have a napkin up on a wall of our bathroom! Not just any napkin. Where to begin with the origin of this piece of cloth. My mother purchased this napkin in the late 1990’s when she was building her collection of vintage restaurant/hotel/train branded dinnerware. The collection was built based on her and my father visited throughout their lifetimes. The collection was proudly displayed in her kitchen on a custom oak display case. The photo showing this big display in my mother’s kitchen, doesn’t do it any justice. I know somewhere in my 20K collection of photos, I have a detailed shot of the collection.
What is missing from my photo collection, is a photo of the framed vintage Shasta Daylight dinning napkin that hung in my mother kitchen between the two door ways to the dinning room and hallway. That napkin was on that wall for almost 20 years. While I opted to place the vintage napkin in the master bathroom, that location made the most sense, considering the moist environment is bad idea for wood frames. Sadly there was no wall space in our kitchen to fit the larger frame. I do remember when my mother found this napkin at an antique store in Soquel during a beach house visit. I also remember when she came to me about having it framed finally in the early 2000’s. I had been working with a frame store in SF called FLAX in the late 90’s to frame pieces of art that I was just starting collect.
Originally she wanted to mount it on paper, and the brilliant woman who I worked with for years, suggested mounting the napkin between two pieces of glass. I’ve done this same mounting with an Eleanor Coen piece that now sits on the second story landing. That piece of art was a watercolor done on both sides of the paper. This napkin holds a strong memory for me, not because it was my mother’s. Rather the memories that my mother and father shared about riding trains in California back in their adolescence and as a married couple. I remember my mother saying, she rode the Shasta Daylight line in her youth with her parents back in the 50’s and possibly in the 60’s.
The Shasta Daylight line was created by the Souther Pacific Railroad company back in 1949, two years after my mother was born. The line fed the San Francisco Bay Area route north up to Portland, Oregon. Daily service on the line started in 1952, and traveled north, giving bay area residents the opportunity view Mt. Shasta and the Siskiyou Mountains which are lined the border between Oregon and California. The train that ran on this line offered several passenger cars, and even dinning cars. The views offered along the line were amazing. This line still exists today and we have rode the line twice as a family to visit Grandma and Grandpa up in Eugene, Oregon on Amtrak.
Now the history is there, the lands that this train line sits on is steeped in controversy with the colonization of indigenous people who lived on the land for centuries prior to the Spanish military arrival in the late 1700’s. There were dozens of tribes during this era, the Miwok’s, Patwin, Umpqua, Conquille and even Shasta, the namesake of the of the original line create in 1895, the Shasta Limited. In the 1950’s the dinning cars were very swanky and offered a pretty solid menu for Dinner and Breakfast. There were typically three dinning cars (Coffee Shop Car, Diner Car, Tavern-Refreshment Car.) For dinner, you could order roasted duck with succotash and a lobster salad. There is even a list for items like Creamed Toast, which from my guess is like French toast, or mashed turnips. I don’t think I have ever made mashed turnips. I am not even sure they have the right consistency to be mashed, rutabaga for sure you can mash! But turnips?
Growing up we had a chance to ride trains but never the Shasta line, because it ended service in 1967, two years before my brother was born. We did however get a chance to tour one of the dinning cars from the Shasta at the California Railroad Museum in Sacramento back in the 80’s. After the train cars were retired in the late 60’s, a lot of the cars were sold to a collector and eventually a large number of the cars were sold to the McCloud River Railway to create a tour train running up and down McCloud line and the Shasta area. The McCloud railway ran the tours and dinners from the 90’s till 2010. My parents on a road trip got a chance to enjoy the train in the early 2000’s. You can read about the McCloud River Railroad Dinner Train on these three pages.
During my mother collection of all the railroad dinnerware, she never really made an effort to purchase one of the dinner plates. The reason why is, the pattern she remembered was not what she found on historical sites or ebay. The pattern is called prairie mountain wildflowers, which she doesn’t remember being used in the Diner and Coffee Shop cars. The photo shown here is the complete set created by Onondaga for the train back in 1950’s. When we were downsizing my moms home, she wanted the whole collection sold off. I ended up taking about 1/4 of her collection, most to keep and a few to sell because I knew they were worth a lot on sites like eBay.. I’ll post about two other plates that hold a strong connection to me and my family later.
Complete Shasta Railway Dinnerware Set
Today the napkin hangs in the bathroom in the original frame. The frame is finished with a aged copper leaf and at first, I didn’t think it was going to go in our all marble bathroom. After 7 months of living with it on the wall. I’ve realized, it’s actually perfect for now. I think the metallic texture gives the frame more longevity to the moisture in the room. In researching this post, I also came to learn the $25 my mom paid for the napkin is now over $200 if I were to sell it today. Now, not sure I want to sell :-) I might however, repaint the frame some day.