New Pass Station
Churchill County, Churchill County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
New Pass Station. The rocks composing the walls of this stage station and freighter stop were in neat array and roofed with bundles of willow twigs in July 1861, when John Butterfield’s Overland Mail & Stage Company began traversing this Central or Simpson Route between Salt Lake City and Genoa, Nevada.The spring on the hill was inadequate for both humans and horses. However, Division Superintendent Thomas Plain’s support ranch, one mile to the west, kept this important team-watering and replacement-stop operating.Completion of the first transcontinental railroad spelled the eventual demise of the Overland Stage line. Butterfield sold out to Wells, Fargo & Company in 1866, which suspended all operations on the Central Route in February 1869. The company continued to operate their diverted equipment on other lines until the early 1870s.STATE HISTORIC
Erected by Boy Scouts Of America – Troop 76 – Reno
The Story
When John Butterfield's Overland Mail & Stage Company began running the Central (Simpson) Route between Salt Lake City and Genoa in July 1861, this stone station—roofed with bundles of willow twigs—was a key stop for watering and changing teams. Because the hillside spring was too weak for both people and horses, a support ranch a mile west kept the station functioning. The transcontinental railroad soon doomed the stage line; Butterfield sold to Wells, Fargo in 1866, and Central Route operations ceased in 1869.
Why it matters
New Pass Station is a relic of the brief, heroic age of overland stage and mail, the service that carried word and passengers across the continent in the years just before the railroad made it obsolete.
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Related people
- · John Butterfield
- · Thomas Plain
Related events
- · Overland Mail Central Route
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Edwards Creek Valley
Churchill County, NV
The springs and streams of Edwards Creek Valley made it a vital gathering ground for Native peoples, where Shoshone families moved seasonally for seeds and small game and wintered in camps later shared by Northern Paiutes. In 1854 Colonel John Reese found a route through the valley shorter than the Humboldt trail, and after surveyor James Simpson formalized it in 1859 it carried the Pony Express, the Overland Telegraph, and the overland stages. Serving too as a passageway to the 1862 Austin gold rush, it remained the region's principal commercial artery until 1880.
Jacobsville
Lander County, NV
Founded on the banks of the Reese River in 1859 by George Washington Jacobs, Lander County's first sheriff, Jacobsville served as an Overland Stage and mail station and became a Pony Express stop in 1860. In its early-1860s prime it held some 400 people and claimed the first telegraph relay station, a post office, courthouse, three stores, and two hotels, and was the first seat of a Lander County that then sprawled across northeastern Nevada. The seat soon moved to booming Austin, and today only a few foundation stones remain.
Rock Creek (Cold Springs Station)
Churchill County, NV
Rock Creek was a vital stagecoach stop on the Overland Mail & Stage Company's line along the Simpson route between Salt Lake City and Genoa, offering fresh horses, blacksmithing, and wagon repair to travelers under John Butterfield and later Wells, Fargo & Company. Nearby stood the Pony Express's Cold Springs station of 1860 and a telegraph repeater serving the transcontinental line completed in 1861. When the transcontinental railroad and its parallel telegraph reached the Humboldt corridor to the north, both the stage route and telegraph here were abandoned.
The Surveyors
Lander County, NV
After the nation's domain reached the Pacific in 1848, the federal government mounted a series of surveys to map railway routes, wagon roads, water transport, and military relationships across the new territories. Nevada figured in two notable efforts: Captain F.W. Lander's Honey Lake to Fort Kearny wagon road, completed in 1860, and Lieutenant Simpson's 1859 route from Camp Floyd to Genoa. Military engineers such as Stansbury, Marcy, Whipple, Beale, Simpson, and Lander lent their names to the landscape, Lander to a whole Nevada county.