International Hotel
Lander County, Lander County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
International Hotel. FIRST COMMERCIAL BUILDINGCONSTRUCTED IN AUSTIN1863This structure was built of lumber from the first International Hotel, constructed in Virginia City.David E. Buel constructed the hotel after being refused a free lot in Clifton at the mouth of the canyon below. Buel, Frederick Baker, W.C. Harrington, and John Veatch located and recorded the original townsite of Austin.STATE HISTORIC
Erected by Bert Acree
The Story
Built in 1863 from lumber salvaged from Virginia City's first International Hotel, this was the first commercial building raised in the new silver camp of Austin. David E. Buel put it up after being refused a free lot down the canyon in Clifton — and Buel, along with Frederick Baker, W. C. Harrington, and John Veatch, went on to locate and record Austin's original townsite. The hotel thus stood at the very founding of one of central Nevada's great Reese River mining towns.
Why it matters
The International Hotel marks the literal first building of Austin, embodying how quickly a silver strike could conjure a full-fledged town out of the Nevada desert.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1863 the middle of Nevada was mostly sagebrush, alkali, and distance. But a silver strike on the Reese River had just set off one of those sudden stampedes that defined the mining West, and almost overnight prospectors, teamsters, and speculators were pouring into the canyon that would become Austin. The nation itself was in the throes of the Civil War, and every new source of Western silver mattered to a Union financing an enormous conflict.
Central Nevada in these years was a landscape of instant towns. A promising ledge of ore could conjure a settlement out of nothing in a matter of weeks — tents first, then rough lumber, then, if the ore held, brick and ambition. Austin sat high in the Toiyabe country, cold and windswept, connected to the wider world only by hard wagon roads.
Into that raw, hopeful moment stepped the people who wanted not just to dig, but to build. A mining camp needed a place to sleep, eat, and make deals, and the man who provided the first real building could plant himself at the very center of the new town's life.
People & events
The story here turns on a slight and a decision. David E. Buel, wanting to establish himself in the new district, was refused a free lot down the canyon at Clifton, near the mouth of the gorge. Rather than accept the rebuff, he moved up the canyon and built his own hotel — and in doing so helped shift the center of gravity to the townsite that became Austin proper.
What makes the building itself remarkable is its lumber. In a place with few trees and fewer sawmills, timber was precious, so Buel's hotel rose from boards hauled from the first International Hotel of Virginia City, dismantled and carried to the Reese River. The recycled wood is a small, vivid emblem of frontier thrift: nothing that could be reused was wasted, not even a whole building.
Buel did not act alone in shaping the town. Together with Frederick Baker, W. C. Harrington, and John Veatch, he located and formally recorded Austin's original townsite — the paperwork that turns a scatter of claims into a legal community. The International Hotel, first commercial building of the new camp, stood as the physical anchor of that founding act.
Its place in the American story
Austin's birth is a compact lesson in how the American West was actually settled. We often imagine westward expansion as a slow tide of farmers, but in the Great Basin it frequently came as a spasm — a mineral rumor, a rush, and a full-blown town almost before anyone had time to lay out streets. The International Hotel captures that speed in a single structure.
The Civil War years gave these silver camps outsized importance. Western bullion helped underwrite the Union, and the same restless energy that opened the Comstock spilled outward into districts like the Reese River, spreading the mining frontier deeper into the interior. Towns like Austin were the far advance guard of that expansion.
And the hotel embodies a truth that outlasts any one boom: the people who founded Western towns were not only miners but organizers — men who recorded townsites, put up commercial buildings, and tried to make permanence out of a gamble. Many such camps later faded, but the act of founding them stitched the map of the interior West together.
If you visit
Come to this stretch of the Reese River country expecting big sky and bigger silence. The land itself does much of the storytelling: steep canyon walls, high desert light, and the sense of just how far a person in 1863 was from anywhere. Standing here, you can feel why a warm, solid building would have meant so much.
As you look around, think about the humble heroism of ordinary materials. The marker's tale of lumber carried all the way from Virginia City rewards a moment's imagination — picture the wagons, the road, the boards that had already sheltered one boomtown pressed into service for another.
This is a place to slow down and let a small marker open a large history. Austin makes a rewarding stop on any road trip through central Nevada's mining country, a chance to trace how a single refused lot and one determined builder helped set the first cornerstone of a desert town.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · David E. Buel
- · Frederick Baker
- · W. C. Harrington
- · John Veatch
Themes & tags
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