Lawrence W. Little Papers

The Lawrence W. Little Papers is divided into three series, reflecting Little's personal life, his career with the Highway Department, and his employment with the Incline General Improvement District.

Little's personal life is well documented, whether his school days, careers in teaching and engineering, or his love of gardening. The earliest item in the collection is a student newspaper, The "Quartz Creek News," written in long hand by Little and containing all the local Quartz Creek, Colorado, news. This paper consists of a "run" of issues from Jan.6 to April 30, 1915.

Between 1971-1977 Little was interviewed for an oral history by Mary Ellen Glass of the University of Nevada-Reno, Oral History Office. Little prepared himself for these interviews by making extensive notes which are contained in five notebooks. These are supplemented by daily journals and small "things to do" spiral notebooks which incorporate his daily work with gardening and social activities.

The Rotary Club of Carson City played an important roll in the Prof's life and his Rotary files are fairly extensive. The files for Little's presidency years (1942-1943) include correspondence, minutes, reports and newsletters. Files for other years (1938-1978) include newsletters, correspondence, a brief history of the club, and programs. Likewise, LIttle's association with the Carson Lodge No.1 of the Freemasons and the Kerak Temple, Reno is documented through correspondence, programs, by-laws, and a membership certificate (1938-1960). Other files in this series contain gardening notes and landscape drawings, teaching (1923-1929) and National Guard certificates and letters, a retirement file, articles about Little and Peakville, New York (home of his paternal ancestors), and records of Little's perlite and tungsten mines. The latter include correspondence, maps, claim forms, and agreements.

Series 2, Nevada Highway Department, documents Little's career as a materials and testing engineer with the Highway Department. Miscellaneous files include the Prof's history of the Department, a small amount of correspondence and meeting notes, and an article about the dedication of the Department's administration building in 1965. The bulk of the series consists of professional and technical papers authored by Little or his colleagues. In general the subject matter is the testing of and standards for highway building materials such as rock aggregates, but of special note are a paper by Alan S. Ryall on "Earthquake Potential in Western Nevada," and Little's paper on the Dayton Sand and Gravel Company.

The last series contains daily field notes compiled by Little as inspector of the Incline General Improvement District. Most of the notes are on road or sewer projects in the then-developing subdivisions at Incline Village, but others are for work along U.S Highway 50, Round Hill to Glenbrook and Round Hill to Cave Rock, and U.S. Highway 50 from Eureka, Nevada to 3.75 miles southeast of Eureka. The notes include date, weather conditions, working crew personnel, work completed, and problems encountered.