Mills Park house ready for public

For Gloria Wungnema, the small stone house at the east end of Mills Park was simply grandma's house.

She and her cousins would climb the fruit trees in the yard and play in the creek that ran next to the house. They would get in trouble for eating the fruit and for tracking mud into the house.

But when Gloria was 8, her grandmother, Pearl, moved, leaving the stone house her husband, Burton Wungnema, built in 1948, in another's hands. Eventually it fell victim to vandals, general disrepair and was on the verge of being torn down.

But now, the Wungnema House in Mills Park is ready for visitors once again.

For more than a year, the Foundation for the Betterment of Carson City Parks has been renovating the 1,000-square-foot stone house, which is owned by the city's Parks and Recreation Department. The renovations cost almost $168,000, much of it taken from Quality of Life funds.

"I think it's a very good step instead of them tearing down the house as they were originally planning to do," Gloria Wungnema said. "To me, it means a lot. That was my grandmother's house. That was the one place the whole family came together, the one place we hung out. My grandpa actually built the house just for our family."

Gloria said the family had planned to keep the restoration a secret from Pearl, but since the foundation asked for pictures of the family and the house, they had to tell her.

"We had to blow it," Gloria said. "(Pearl) was pleasantly surprised. She's just happy the house isn't being torn down."

Fred Stanio, president of the parks foundation, said the foundation is hoping to turn most of the house into a museum, an idea which has garnered interest from the Stewart Indian Museum, he said. But first, the foundation is hosting a grand opening for the Wungnema house at 12:30 p.m. Sunday. Refreshments will be served.

The house sits at the east end of Mills Park, just off the park's Saliman Drive entrance. When it was built, the two-story home was on the edge of the Carson City/Ormsby County line.

Burton Wungnema, a Hopi Indian from Arizona, built the house of pink stone from his father Earnest's Brunswick Canyon quarries. Pearl was pregnant with the first of their five children who would call the tiny house home.

Hopi tradition was built into the home with the fireplace. The stones at the top of the hearth are set in a design representative of the Hopi water clan, Burton's clan. With the renovation, one of the Wungnema grandchildren built a small hearth made of the same stone used to build the house around the upstairs fireplace, Stanio said.

The house sat next to a cottonwood forest and small creek in which the children and and some of the 22 grandchildren played. After Burton Wungnema died in 1956, the family continued to live in the house, which has a kitchen, bathroom, dining room and family room downstairs and one bedroom upstairs.

The house was sold to a developer in 1977, but plans for the house fell through and eventually it fell into disrepair before it was sold to the city. Area residents voiced their concern about preserving the history of the home, and within the last year, the parks foundation stepped in.

Stanio said much of the work on the house was not only repairing the damage from years of neglect, but also making the house completely accessible to the public. That meant adding handicap ramps and a restroom, completely redoing the kitchen and widening the stairs to the small upstairs room. The foundation will occupy a small room, almost a closet, which was separated from the second story's main room during the renovation. Stanio said one room downstairs will be used as a meeting room for whoever wants to have a meeting at the Wungnema house.

For the Wungnema family, Gloria said the house's preservation will be a lesson to future generations of the family's roots.

"I go there and I think, 'See how small this is? There were eight children living in this house, plus the dogs, cats and whatever else they brought home,'" Gloria said. "This is where we used to live. It will be a great lesson for (future generations) to see that the family had a place to be. Now this house is a part of the community and everyone can come see it and learn how our family lived."

If you go:

What: Wungnema House grand opening

When: 12:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Wungnema House, east end of Mills Park off Saliman Drive.

For information: Call the city's Parks and Recreation Department at 887-2363 Fred Stanio at 882-7403 or Jo Saulisberry at 883-0345.