Poster Celebrating the Importance of the Big Four Railroad Enterprise

The Mark Hopkins Mansion

One rumor had it that Mrs. Hopkins built their mansion on such a grand scale “to put Jane Stanford in her place.”

The Stanford Mansion

The Crocker Mansion

The Crocker Spite Fence

(Detail of an Eadweard Muybridge photo taken in 1877, photoshopped to highlight the Crocker mansion and spite fence)

The Huntington Mansion

Ambrose Bierce on Collis P. Huntington: “… sole honest man/in all the reek of that rapscallion clan”