Gardner's Ranch
Carson City, Carson City, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Gardner’s Ranch. On this site in the period from 1870 until 1918 stood the ornate two-story home of Matthew Culbertson Gardner, rancher and lumberman. The residence was headquarters for Gardner’s 300-acre ranch in the meadows to the southward.Here was located, 1870 to 1898, the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company large lumberyard here. During the 1870s and 1880s, Gardner logged south of Lake Tahoe for the company and built the only standard gauge logging railroad in the Tahoe Basin. He maintained his home here.Gardner died in 1908. The residence was destroyed by a fire August 20, 1918. Many of the old trees on the ground once shaded the Gardner family.
Erected by Carson City Historical Commission
The Story
From 1870 to 1918 this site held the ornate two-story home of Matthew Culbertson Gardner, rancher and lumberman, headquarters of his 300-acre ranch in the meadows to the south. Alongside it stood the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company's great lumberyard, and through the 1870s and 1880s Gardner logged south of Lake Tahoe—building the only standard-gauge logging railroad in the Tahoe Basin. Gardner died in 1908, and fire consumed the house in 1918, leaving only old shade trees behind.
Why it matters
Gardner's ranch illustrates how a single frontier entrepreneur could bridge cattle ranching and industrial logging to serve the insatiable Comstock mining economy.
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Related people
- · Matthew Culbertson Gardner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Historic Flume And Lumberyard
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Half a mile south of here once sprawled the yard of the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, the greatest of the Comstock timber operations working the Lake Tahoe Basin from 1870 to 1898. Rough lumber and cordwood arrived down a 12-mile V-flume from Spooner's Summit in the Sierra, filling a yard a mile long and half a mile wide. A spur of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad then carried the timber onward to feed the mines and mills of the Comstock.
Bliss Mansion
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Empire and the Carson River Mills
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When the Comstock Lode broke open in 1859, the riddle of how to crush and reduce its fabulously rich ore fell to a string of mills, and the Carson River — with its steady water power — became the answer. Beginning with a small mill in 1860 that grew into the Mexican, a line of works rose downstream, feeding the town of Empire and producing fortunes in gold and silver for more than forty years. Ore first came by wagon and later aboard the famed Virginia and Truckee Railroad, built in 1869, past mills with names like Yellow Jacket, Brunswick, and Santiago.
Lakeview
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By 1863 two hotels and their stables stood here, and in 1872 one became a station on the newly finished Virginia & Truckee Railroad between Carson City and Reno. Beneath the highway run three inverted-siphon pipelines of the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, whose 76-mile box-flume and pipeline system — begun in 1873 to carry Sierra water to the Comstock — became world-famous engineering. From 1881 Lakeview also served as a lumber storage yard, fed after 1887 by a V-flume and shipped by rail to the mines until activity ceased in 1896.