Ragtown
Churchill County, Churchill County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Ragtown. Ragtown was never a town, but the name of a most welcome oasis and hamlet. This mecca on the banks of nearby Carson River received its name from the appearance of pioneer laundry spread on every hand bush around. The Forty-Mile Desert, immediately to the north, was the most dreaded portion of the California Emigrant Trail. Ragtown was the first water stop after the desert. To the thirst-craved emigrants and their animals, no site was more welcome than the trees lining the Carson River. Imagine, if you will, the moment when the animals first picked up the scent of water--the lifted head, the quickened pace, and finally the mad, frenzied dash to the water's edge. Then, rest and repair for the arduous crossing of the Sierra Nevada that lay ahead. In 1854, Asa Kenyon located a trading post near Ragtown. Here he offered goods and supplies to the trappers. During the 1850's and 1860's, Ragtown was one of the most important sites on the Carson branch of the California Trail.
Erected by Churchill County Museum Committee
The Story
Ragtown was never truly a town but a beloved oasis on the Carson River, its name drawn from the pioneer laundry draped across every bush by emigrants who had just survived the Forty-Mile Desert. For thirst-crazed travelers and their animals, the cottonwoods lining the river were the first water after the trail's most dreaded crossing. In 1854 Asa Kenyon set up a trading post nearby, and through the 1850s and 1860s Ragtown ranked among the most important stops on the Carson branch of the California Trail.
Why it matters
Ragtown was a lifesaving waypoint that let thousands of exhausted emigrants recover before the final push over the Sierra Nevada.
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Related people
- · Asa Kenyon
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hazen
Churchill County, NV
Hazen sprang up in 1903 as a rough-and-tumble camp housing laborers on the federal Newlands irrigation project, one of the first reclamation efforts to green the Nevada desert. When the railroad to Tonopah arrived in 1905 and the Southern Pacific built a roundhouse and depot the next year, the town of hotels, saloons, and brothels boomed—alongside a reputation for lawlessness that included the 1905 lynching of 'Red' Wood. Fire nearly wiped it out in 1908, and the town named for Civil War general William B. Hazen never fully recovered.
Stillwater
Churchill County, NV
Named for the calm pools nearby, Stillwater took shape as an overland stage station in 1862 — two years before Nevada's statehood — gained a post office in 1865, and became Churchill County's third county seat in 1868. Its population peaked around 1880, and when the seat moved to Fallon in 1904 barely thirty residents remained. Though its town center is gone, the valley's fertile fields still testify to its pioneer ranchers, and the 163,000-acre Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, created in 1949, now adjoins the Stillwater Indian Reservation.
Buckland's Station
Lyon County, NV
Samuel S. Buckland settled here in 1859, starting a ranch, a station for the Overland Stage Company, and a tent hotel, and building the first bridge across the Carson River below Genoa. In 1860 his station became the assembly point for volunteers in the Pyramid Lake War and a remount stop on the Pony Express. He later ran a store supplying soldiers at nearby Fort Churchill, and built his two-story house from timbers salvaged when the fort was dismantled.
Pony Express Route
Churchill County, NV
Founded in 1860 by freighting partners W.H. Russell, Alexander Majors, and William B. Waddell, the Pony Express strung roughly 184 relay stations across 2,000 miles between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California — thirty of them across Nevada. Eighty riders and some 400 horses carried the mail in about ten days, an astonishing speed for the era, though the five-dollar postage and the brutal conditions of heat, cold, thirst, and frontier conflict made it costly in every sense. When the transcontinental telegraph was completed in October 1861, the service that had taken ten days was rendered obsolete in ten seconds.