Piper's Opera House
Storey County, Storey County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Piper’s Opera House. This building, the most significant vintage theatre in the West, was erected by John Piper in 1885. Third in a succession of theatres which he operated on the Comstock, Piper’s Opera House, with its original scenery, raked stage, and elegant proscenium boxes, is a remarkable survivor of a colorful era in American theatrical history. Many popular nineteenth-century touring stars and concert artists appeared here.
Erected by Division Of Historic Preservation And Archeologylouise Z. Driggs
The Story
John Piper built this opera house in 1885, the third in his succession of Comstock theatres, and it survives as perhaps the most significant vintage theatre in the West. With its original scenery, raked stage, and elegant proscenium boxes, it hosted many of the touring stars and concert artists who brought big-city culture to the silver metropolis of Virginia City. It remains a remarkable relic of a colorful chapter in American theatrical history.
Why it matters
Piper's Opera House shows that a rough mining boomtown could also crave and support high culture, preserving the stagecraft of a vanished theatrical era.
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Related people
- · John Piper
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Comstock Lode
Storey County, NV
In 1859 prospectors struck the Comstock Lode, a 2½-mile band of fabulously rich silver and gold ore, and Virginia City exploded into one of the West's great boomtowns. For twenty years its mines poured out wealth that helped bankroll the building of San Francisco and pushed Nevada toward statehood in 1864. The yellow tailings dumps still visible across the hills mark where legendary mines like the Ophir and Con Virginia burrowed into the earth.
Devil's Gate
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This rugged reef of rock was one of the most famous landmarks of Nevada Territory, guarding the narrow gorge through which thousands of prospectors streamed toward the Comstock Lode. Nearby in June 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly found the first gold nugget ever unearthed in Gold Canyon, opening a decade of placer mining. During the brief Paiute War of 1860, Silver City's residents built a stone battlement and even a wooden cannon atop the eastern summit for defense.
Geiger Station
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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.
Hall's Station
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In the early 1850s Spafford Hall, the area's first permanent settler, built a station and trading post here to serve emigrants pressing on toward California. After a hunting injury in 1854 he sold out, and the post passed through several hands — becoming McMarlin's Station and later belonging to Major Ormsby, who died in 1860 at the first battle of the Pyramid Lake War. The site is also remembered as the place where the area's first recorded dance was held on New Year's Eve, 1853.