Historic Carson City home coming back to life after fire

As the Nevada landscape is layered, so is the history that grounds a multidisciplinary consulting firm in the community, and so is an effort to rebuild the firm’s historic homebase in west Carson known as the Lee House.

Resource Concepts Inc. Principals John McLain, 82, Bruce Scott, 79, and Jeremy Drew, 43, sat down Nov. 18 to discuss reconstruction of the 1906-07 house at 340 N. Minnesota St., that served as RCI’s office for more than four decades until a fire broke out in 2022.

McLain remembered getting a call around midnight on Oct. 13 of that year. He thought it was a prank call, but it was followed by a knock on the door and police officers informing him his office was “engulfed.”

“We came down and watched it go,” he said. “It was terrible.”

Each partner praised the Carson City Fire Department and assisting departments for their fight to save the structure.

“Firefighters quickly made entry into the building to search for trapped occupants; fortunately, no one was located inside the building,” according to CCFD at the time. “Due to the advanced fire conditions, firefighters were forced to battle the blaze from the exterior of the building.”

Drew said Douglas County crews came over the hill that night to assist and could see exactly where the blaze was, lighting up the night sky. A 1999 graduate and football player of Douglas High, Drew had just moved some of his memorabilia including football gear into a new office on the house’s west side. Despite it being rivalry week between Douglas and Carson, someone from CCFD saved the gear, he said.

“The one part that didn’t burn, the basement, was full of three or four feet of water, which is, ironically, where all of the water rights files were,” Drew remembered.

He remembered something else: “To John and Bruce’s credit, from day one — like flames are just out and it’s still smoldering — their commitment was to bringing that building back the way it was.”

Several investigations posited the source of the fire was the kitchen, either some appliance or electrical problem, though the findings were not conclusive other than to rule out foul play, according to the partners.

They put the estimated costs of rebuilding at $2 million.

“People have been great,” Scott said. “We feel like we want to continue to be a key part of the neighborhood. We feel like we’re part of what the west side should be about.”

A heroic doctor

The approximately 3,800-square-foot Lee House takes its name from a Civil War vet and intrepid doctor who built the house with the salvaged timber of a school building at the turn of the 20th century.

Simeon L. Lee served under the 8th Illinois Infantry under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, according to a history of the Kit Carson Trail that covers Carson’s historic district. Attending medical school and moving west after the war, Lee found himself working around Nevada including at the mining camp of Pioche in 1872. Settling in Carson in 1879, he was, among other things, the surgeon for the V&T and Carson & Colorado railroads.

“He was the first president of the Nevada State Board of Health and at one time was secretary of the Board of Registration and Examination,” according to the history. “One incident of his practice may be related, when Dr. Lee was called upon to travel to Lake Tahoe during a winter blizzard. He had to attend a woman in labor. Dr. Lee went on snowshoes almost all the way. When he arrived at the lake, it was rough and dangerous. Despite warnings that he could not reach the opposite shore, he set out in a boat and after a harrowing experience reached his destination and saved the mother and baby.”

Lee died in Carson in 1927. His spouse, Lola Lee, lived in the house until her death in 1934. The following year, Clark J. Guild, a judge and founder of the Nevada State Museum, purchased the house and lived there until his death in 1971. The house is sometimes referred to as the Lee-Guild house because of the judge’s time there. According to the aforementioned history, the house saw one more owner, the Scripps family, before RCI purchased the site.

A deep love of Nevada

McLain grew up in Montana, a different kind of big sky than Nevada, and discovered the Silver State during a job post with the USDA Soil Conservation Service (now known as NRCS). He said he told his wife they would transfer back to Montana in a year.

“I didn’t want to be out in this desert,” McLain said.

He quickly added: “We really did fall in love with it. Out there doing range management work and working with soil scientists mapping soils and vegetation in this desert environment just really hooked me. I just loved it.”

What amazed him was the bleak-looking basins, and following a seemingly dry creek bed up a mountain to find cottonwood trees, “all kinds of vegetation,” live water. To him, the basin-and-range country was layered.

“You see things here that you don’t see in a lot of areas that I’ve ever been, and it really grows on you, and I love the quiet of the Great Basin. It’s beautiful,” he said.

He stressed the Nevada landscape requires a “different kind of treatment, management, appreciation.”

McLain would raise a family in Carson, the same way Scott would after he landed in the capital city circa 1969. Scott had grown up in Northen California before moving to Illinois. After college, he returned west and worked for the Nevada Division of Water Resources.

Scott recalled McLain helping with a soil-stabilization and erosion-control project on the southern edge of the city.

“It was actually essentially where Trader Joe’s is now … when you cross Clear Creek, that’s one of the bridges that we designed, one of the culverts we designed before we started RCI,” Scott said.

Two others, John Hancock — Carson City planner and architect — and Gerry Hester, a civil engineer, founded RCI with Scott and McLain. What they started at the time was something new and dynamic to match the challenges of the landscape.

“There was nobody around like it,” said Scott. “You had engineering firms. You had architectural firms. You had planners. You had natural resource type people — archeologists, or wetlands specialists, you know, soil scientists, that sort of thing — but we sort of brought a lot of that together and felt that development needed more resource focus.”

Nearly half a century later, the “multidisciplinary resource-focused consulting firm,” as Scott put it, offers civil engineering, surveying, natural resources consulting, environmental services and water rights consulting.

“A lot of firms claim to be multidisciplinary, but they’ll have, you know, engineering in Reno, and environmental will be in Sacramento,” said McLain. “We’ll get a project. We’ll bring the pieces together, but this firm has always been together.”

With 40-50 employees, the firm has hundreds of public and private customers all over the Silver State. Clients have ranged from state grazing boards to the U.S. Air Force.

“We were hired by the U.S. Air Force to study the MX Missile because they were having tremendous battles with Nevada and Utah trying to lay down the missile out here in the Great Basin,” McLain recalled of the early 1980s during the Cold War.

The goal was to create a network of silos, bunkers and railroads in the Great Basin to keep the missiles moving, so the Soviet Union couldn’t pinpoint their location, the partners said. But the reality was the project posed significant impacts to ranchers and other users of the land, RCI found.

McLain said the Air Force was “pissed” when the firm’s report was released, effectively killing the project.

One project that was successful in this century was structuring a deal to get the town of Minden’s plentiful water to north Douglas County, Indian Hills and Carson City. Scott said he served as Minden’s engineer for 40 years and helped spearhead the system connecting the region.

“I think it’s done a lot for the region because it provides an alternative water supply, a supplemental water supply to Carson, and a supply to Indian Hills and Douglas County that allows them not to have to treat their water,” he said.

Scott also served on the Carson City Open Space Advisory Committee, helping steer the city’s acquisition of open space and trails. He currently serves on the Nevada State Board for Financing Water Projects.

Other RCI partners have shared in this legacy of public service, including Joe Cacioppo, current president of the Carson City School Board.

Drew, who graduated from UNR in 2005, joined RCI within months after turning down his dream job with Ducks Unlimited.

“For real, they wanted me to go to Rancho Cordova, but I am a Nevada kid,” Drew said. “Truth be told, these two (McLain and Scott) are the reasons I came here. I just inherited what they started doing.”

Passionate about wildlife, Drew served for six years on the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners and three years on the Nevada Sagebrush Ecosystem Council. He described RCI projects like studying the impacts of a proposed train (with nuclear waste) to Yucca Mountain in 2009 and recent work on the Naval Air Station Fallon expansion.

“We still do the basic environmental permitting that most environmental consulting firms would do, but we also have a little bit more policy bent because of our background and the relationships that these guys have started,” Drew said.

He characterized Nevada as a tough and diverse landscape.

“The thing I love about our work is it doesn’t matter which of our core service areas you’re talking about — it can be engineering or water rights or resources — it all has a tie back to community. And somehow those communities have figured out a way to survive in that tough, diverse landscape for all these decades, so if we can keep those communities thriving and preserving that culture and tradition, to me that’s the most fun part of our work.

“The community support we’ve gotten back because so many people realize how tied we are to some of these communities… that’s been kind of the full circle part for me.”

Scott acknowledged Nevada is changing but said, “To me, one of the attractive things is it’s still, in many respects, a small state.”

A team effort

During the Appeal interview, RCI employees were working out of three trailer offices set up in parking lot west of the home being reconstructed. That’s no accident. The parking lot was leased to the firm from the owner, Carson City School District, and to set up offices required a special use permit. Such a permit was approved by Carson City planning commissioners in December 2022.

Immediately after the fire, neighboring businesses like Allison MacKenzie, the law firm, offered office space to displaced staff. Drew remembered city officials reaching out “while the fire was still going” reassuring the firm they would help with permitting. The desire from the beginning was to rebuild, through demolition and abatement of hazardous materials, through the approval process of the Historic Resources Commission.

“You can’t stand out on the porch without someone saying it looks great and ‘Thanks for bringing it back,’” Drew said.

But he noted the challenge of trying to replicate every detail of the historic home. The fire destroyed much of the structure. The north wall survived, including the brick chimney, as did the sandstone footings quarried from the historic Nevada State Prison. The partners were able to reuse bits and pieces: the original radiators, a window frame. What they couldn’t salvage, they were determined to recreate using historical sources like neighbors’ comparable architecture, or company photographs from “community events and backyard client socials.”

“Those really helped us tremendously piecing things back together,” Drew said of the photographs.

He also commended the firm’s employees for adjusting to the rebuilding process. The partners were cautiously optimistic they’d be moving back into the Lee House in the first quarter of the new year. They hoped to have a celebration party next summer when the landscaping, which was torched, could be reestablished, and when the huge front porch, now reframed, could once again accommodate people in warm weather.

McLain said RCI employees have “toughed it out.”

“I can’t get over how hard they work and how well they coordinate,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

For information about RCI go to rci-nv.com.