Moana Springs
Reno, Washoe County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Moana Springs. Opened as a resort on October 29, 1905, Moana Springs took its name from a famous Hawaiian spa. In addition to a large bath house with a pool fed by hot springs, Moana had a stately hotel, a clubhouse, baseball diamond and picnic grounds. Constructed and initially operated by Charles T. Short, (who gave the resort its name), Al North and John N. Evans, Moana was acquired by Louis W. Berrum in 1913 and remained in his family for the next four decades. Served by Berrum’s Nevada interurban trolley line from 1907 to 1920, Moana hosted dances, rodeos, boxing matches, trapshoots, circuses and aviation exhibitions. The City of Reno purchased Moana in 1956 and the remaining buildings were demolished the next year to make way for a new recreational complex.
Erected by Division Of Historic Preservation And Archeologywashoe County Historical Society
The Story
Opened in 1905 and named for a famous Hawaiian spa, Moana Springs was a Reno resort built around a bathhouse and pool fed by natural hot springs, complete with a hotel, clubhouse, and picnic grounds. Reached by Berrum's Nevada interurban trolley line, it drew crowds for dances, rodeos, boxing matches, circuses, and even aviation exhibitions through the early decades of the century. The City of Reno bought the property in 1956 and cleared its remaining buildings for a new recreational complex.
Why it matters
Moana Springs captures the age of the trolley-served pleasure resort, when interurban railways carried city dwellers to hot-springs spas for a taste of leisure at the century's turn.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Reno was growing from a railroad town into a small city, and Americans everywhere were discovering a new appetite for leisure. The Progressive era brought rising wages, shorter workweeks for some, and a cultural enthusiasm for fresh air, exercise, and wholesome public amusement. Resorts built around natural springs sprang up across the country, promising health and recreation in equal measure.
Moana Springs, which opened its doors in the autumn of 1905, was Reno's answer to that national mood. Its founders borrowed the name of a celebrated Hawaiian spa, lending a touch of faraway glamour to a patch of the high desert — a bit of marketing that captured how exotic and aspirational the idea of a "spa resort" still felt to ordinary people.
Just as important as the springs was how people got there. This was the golden age of the interurban trolley, when electric rail lines stitched together towns and carried city dwellers out to parks, lakes, and pleasure grounds on weekends. A resort on the edge of town was only as successful as the transit that reached it, and Moana's fortunes would rise with the rails.
People & events
The resort was built and first run by Charles T. Short, who gave it its evocative name, together with his partners Al North and John N. Evans. From the start it was conceived as more than a swimming hole: there was a large bathhouse with a pool fed by the hot springs, a stately hotel, a clubhouse, a baseball diamond, and picnic grounds — a whole landscape of organized fun under one name.
In 1913 the property passed to Louis W. Berrum, and it would stay in his family for roughly the next four decades. Berrum's name matters for a second reason: his Nevada interurban trolley line carried passengers out to Moana from 1907 to 1920, making him both the man who owned the destination and the man who moved the crowds to it. That combination helps explain how the resort stayed lively for so long.
And lively it was. Over the years Moana hosted dances and rodeos, boxing matches and trapshoots, circuses and even aviation exhibitions — a remarkable range that shows how a single resort could serve as a community's fairground, sporting arena, and social hall all at once. In an age before television and the automobile reshaped everything, a place like this was where a town gathered to be entertained.
Its place in the American story
Moana Springs is a perfect small window onto a vanished American institution: the trolley-served pleasure resort. Across the country, electric railway companies built or promoted amusement parks, spas, and picnic grounds at the ends of their lines, precisely to give people a reason to ride on weekends. The resort and the railway fed each other, and for a couple of decades the arrangement defined how Americans played.
The later chapters of Moana's story are just as representative. Trolley service ended in 1920, as buses and private automobiles began to erode the interurban model nationwide — a shift that doomed pleasure resorts everywhere once people no longer needed a rail line to reach their fun. The city's purchase of the property in 1956 and the demolition of its old buildings the next year to make room for a modern recreational complex mirrors a pattern repeated in countless towns, as aging Gilded Age amusements gave way to mid-century public facilities.
So the rise and fall of this one Reno resort traces, in miniature, the whole arc of how American leisure was organized and reorganized across half a century — from the hiss of a hot spring and the clang of a trolley bell to the tidy civic recreation centers of the postwar age.
If you visit
Don't come expecting to find the grand old hotel or the steaming bathhouse — those were cleared away long ago, and what stands today belongs to a later era of public recreation. Come instead to stand on ground that was, for half a century, one of the liveliest gathering places in the region, and to let the contrast between then and now do its quiet work on your imagination.
As you look around, picture the layers of activity the marker describes: swimmers in the hot-spring pool, crowds at a boxing match or a rodeo, families spreading blankets on the picnic grounds, and an early flying machine drawing gasps at an aviation exhibition. Imagine, too, the electric trolley that once rattled out from the city, unloading passengers dressed for a day of play.
It makes a thoughtful stop on a Reno-area road trip, especially for travelers who like to read a landscape for what it used to be. Pair it with the city's other early-twentieth-century sites and you begin to feel the rhythm of a community that knew how to gather, celebrate, and reinvent its spaces for each new generation.
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
- · Louis W. Berrum
- · Charles T. Short
Themes & tags
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