Old Geiger Grade
Storey County, Storey County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Old Geiger Grade. Marker damaged by collision. Placed on priority repair list 2017.In the canyon below is the Old Geiger Grade road. Constructed by Dr Davison M. Geiger and John H. Tilton in 1862, this old toll road was the most direct connection between the Comstock Lode and the Truckee Meadows, until replaced by the present, New Deal-era highway in 1936.Concord stages, mud wagons, and ten-mule freighters carried thousands of passengers and millions of dollars in precious cargo across this section of the Virginia Range. There are many stories of unpredictable winds, snows, landslides, and the everlasting danger of lurking highwaymen involving this precipitous stretch of road. Dead Man’s Point and “Robber’s” Roost, two of the most famous features of the road, can be seen from this marker.
Erected by Nevada State Historic Preservation Office
The Story
In the canyon below runs the Old Geiger Grade, a toll road built in 1862 by Dr. Davison M. Geiger and John H. Tilton as the most direct link between the Comstock Lode and the Truckee Meadows. Concord stages, mud wagons, and ten-mule freight teams carried thousands of passengers and millions in precious cargo across the Virginia Range, braving sudden winds, snows, landslides, and lurking highwaymen. Landmarks like Dead Man's Point and Robber's Roost recall its dangers; the grade served until a New Deal–era highway replaced it in 1936.
Why it matters
The Geiger Grade is a monument to the perilous roads that moved Comstock silver to the wider world before modern highways tamed the mountains.
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Related people
- · Davison M. Geiger
- · John H. Tilton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Geiger Station
Washoe County, NV
In the boom decades of Nevada's Comstock Lode, the Geiger Grade Toll Road carried silver-rush traffic between the mines of Virginia City and the ranches of the Truckee Meadows, and Geiger's Station was its busiest stop. With a toll house, blacksmith shops, barns, corrals, and the Magnolia House inn, it was a crossroads of freight outfits, stagecoaches, and weary teamsters. When the Virginia & Truckee Railroad reached Reno in 1872, the toll road faded, but the inn kept hosting travelers and dances until 1915.
Steamboat Springs
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Below Reno on the eastern flank of the Sierra, these steaming, hissing hot springs so resembled a distant paddle-wheeler that emigrants named them for a steamboat. Located by Felix Monet in 1860 and soon fitted with a hospital and bathhouses, Steamboat became a health resort whose curative reputation drew visitors including President Ulysses S. Grant in 1879. The Virginia & Truckee Railroad's arrival in 1871 briefly made it a transfer point for Comstock freight bound uphill to Virginia City, and the resort's heyday tracked the silver bonanza of the 1870s before mining's collapse dimmed its fortunes.
Mc Cone's Foundries
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In 1862 Ivy Mead, John McCone, and a partner opened a foundry in Gold Canyon, moving it to this granite building two years later to serve the booming Comstock mines. McCone took sole ownership in 1866 and, after an 1872 fire, absorbed the Fulton Foundry to build what may have been the largest foundry in Nevada, employing 110 men. Its shops cast the early machinery of the Virginia and Truckee Railway and, in 1880, the largest casting ever poured on the Pacific Coast.
Huffaker's
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When Granville W. Huffaker drove 500 head of cattle into the Truckee Meadows in 1858, the valley's main settlers were Mormons; he established his ranch the following year just as the Comstock Lode focused new attention on the region. Through the 1860s Huffaker's grew into a bustling stage stop and community center, with a stage line, post office, and an 1868 schoolhouse, hosting dances, horse races, and even a literary society. In 1875 the "Bonanza Kings" completed their great lumber flume from the Tahoe basin to a nearby terminus, where the Virginia and Truckee Railroad built a depot and spur to transfer the timber.