Sand Harbor
Washoe County, Washoe County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Sand Harbor (1881 1896). History records Sand Harbor as playing an important role in the operations of the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company, one of three large companies supplying lumber and cordwood to the Comstock mines during the late 19th century. Walter Scott Hobart organized the company, and John Bear Overton was its general manager.The steamer “Niagara” towed log rafts from company land at the south end of Lake Tahoe to Sand Harbor. Here the logs were loaded on narrow-guage railway cars and taken two miles north to a sawmill on Mill Creek.Lumber and cordwood were started on the way to Virginia City via an incline tramway 4,000 feet long, and rising 1,400 feet up the mountainside where the material was transferred to water flumes and transported to Lakeview just north of Carson City.The tramway has been described as “The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada”.
Erected by Division Of Historic Preservation And Archaeology
The Story
From 1881 to 1896, Sand Harbor on Lake Tahoe was a key link in the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company's operation, one of three great firms feeding timber to the Comstock mines. Logs rafted across the lake by the steamer Niagara were milled here, then hauled up the mountainside on "The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada" — a tramway 4,000 feet long that climbed 1,400 feet before flumes carried the wood toward Virginia City. Walter Scott Hobart organized the company, with John Bear Overton as its general manager.
Why it matters
The audacious incline and flume system shows the extraordinary engineering the silver boom demanded, moving whole forests over mountains to sustain the mines below.
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Related people
- · Walter Scott Hobart
- · John Bear Overton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Great Incline Of The Sierra Nevada
Washoe County, NV
On the mountain above stood the "Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada," a 4,000-foot steam-powered cable railway completed in 1880 by the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company. Using 8,000 feet of wire cable wound over massive bull wheels, it hauled cordwood and lumber 1,800 feet up the slope to a V-flume that carried it down to Washoe Valley. From there wagons delivered the timber to the insatiable mines of the Comstock, moving as much as 300 cords a day.
Spooner Area
Douglas County, NV
This area takes its name from Michele E. Spooner, a French-Canadian entrepreneur who helped launch the wood and lumber industry that supplied the Comstock's mines and mills. Beginning in 1868 he partnered in the Summit Fluming Company, running a shingle mill and sawmill, and additional mills followed at Spooner Meadows in 1873. That year the operations were absorbed into the Carson & Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, headquartered at Glenbrook, which grew into the largest of the great Comstock timber combines.
Lakeview
Carson City, NV
By 1863 two hotels and their stables stood here, and in 1872 one became a station on the newly finished Virginia & Truckee Railroad between Carson City and Reno. Beneath the highway run three inverted-siphon pipelines of the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, whose 76-mile box-flume and pipeline system — begun in 1873 to carry Sierra water to the Comstock — became world-famous engineering. From 1881 Lakeview also served as a lumber storage yard, fed after 1887 by a V-flume and shipped by rail to the mines until activity ceased in 1896.
Franktown
Washoe County, NV
Orson Hyde, a probate judge in Utah Territory, founded Franktown in the Washoe Valley in 1855, and after the Comstock silver strike of 1859 its sawmill and a sixty-stamp quartz mill became vital suppliers of timber and ore processing for the booming mines. Hundreds of workers labored at the mill amid a district of fertile farms. When a railroad linked Carson City directly to Virginia City in 1869, Franktown's milling business quickly lost its purpose and the once-prosperous town declined.