Panaca Ward Chapel
Lincoln County, Lincoln County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Panaca Ward Chapel. One of the oldest buildings in Lincoln County, the Panaca Ward Chapel was constructed of adobe from the swamps west of town in 1867-1868.Built as a Mormon chapel, the building was also used as a school and recreation hall. The chapel is typical of the development in small Mormon pioneer communities in the intermountain West during the mid-1800s.
Erected by Elbert B. Edwards
The Story
Raised from adobe dug out of the swamps west of town in 1867–1868, the Panaca Ward Chapel is one of the oldest buildings in Lincoln County. Built as a Mormon meetinghouse, it doubled as a schoolhouse and recreation hall—the multipurpose heart of a small pioneer settlement. Its plain adobe form is typical of the tight-knit Latter-day Saint communities that colonized the intermountain West in the mid-1800s.
Why it matters
It stands as a rare survivor of Mormon pioneer town-building, when a single humble building served a frontier community's faith, learning, and gathering all at once.
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Nearby & related markers
Panaca Mercantile
Lincoln County, NV
Built of adobe in 1868, this building — long known as the Panaca Co-op — housed the Panaca Cooperative Mercantile Institution, a member-owned venture of more than a hundred stockholders formed to handle the community's barter, merchandising, and marketing. Six-mule teams hauled wagons of goods down from Salt Lake and returned laden with produce from the surrounding region.
Panaca
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Founded in 1864 by Francis C. Lee and fellow Mormon colonists, Panaca became southern Nevada's first permanent settlement—poor in resources but rich in the persistence of its people. Though mines boomed at nearby Bullionville and Pioche, and coke ovens fed their smelters in the 1870s, Panaca stayed an agricultural town. Originally part of Utah, it was transferred to Nevada by Congress in 1866, touching off a bitter tax dispute finally settled in the settlers' favor in 1871. Little changed, the town endures today.
Panaca Spring
Lincoln County, NV
The steady flow of warm water from Panaca Spring made a green oasis of Meadow Valley in the surrounding desert. First noted by the ill-fated Death Valley party of 1849, the site was briefly cultivated in 1858 by Brigham Young's White Mountain Mission men seeking a refuge from a feared federal invasion of Utah, then abandoned when that crisis passed. Dependent on the spring, Mormon settlers returned to found Panaca in 1864—the first permanent settlement in southern Nevada—and organized the Meadow Valley Mining District that same year.
Pioche
Lincoln County, NV
Silver was found in these mountains in 1864, but Pioche did not truly ignite until 1869, when its mines opened and drew a wild rush of prospectors and fortune seekers. Through the 1870s the town earned a hard reputation for gunmen and courtroom feuds even as miners pulled more than five million dollars in ore from the ground by 1872. Boom gave way to bust and near-abandonment by 1900, yet Pioche endured as the Lincoln County seat and supply center, and a lead-zinc revival beginning in 1937 brought two more prosperous decades.