Huntsman/Nielsen House, Fillmore
When the Huntsman family had this stately home built c.1871, they could never have imagined that some 90 years later it would harbor a back-yard bomb shelter to protect against a Soviet nuclear attack. After the Nielsen family purchased the house in the late 1950s, they retrofitted and expanded the old stone-lined root cellar behind the house to be an emergency refuge. New 18-inch thick concrete walls were poured, and a concrete cap was poured over the top. This concrete roof doubled as a patio.
The two Nielsen boys used the shelter as their own little get-away, heating it up in the winter months with the pot-belly stove that was installed during the retrofit. The two small windows on the south, just above ground level, provided light, but probably would not have provided much protection against radiation in the aftermath of an atomic bomb explosion.
