Silver Peak
Esmeralda County, Esmeralda County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Silver Peak. Silver Peak is one of the oldest mining areas in Nevada. A 10-stamp mill was built in 1865, and by 1867, a 20-stamp mill was in operation. Mining camp lawlessness prevailed during the late 1860s and over the next 38 years, Silver Peak had its ups and downs. In 1906, the Pittsburg Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought a group of properties, constructed the Silver Peak Railroad, and built a 100-stamp mill at Blair the following year.Silver Peak was, at times, one of the leading camps in Nevada, but by 1917 it was abandoned. The town burned in 1948 and little happened until the Foote Mineral Company began extraction of lithium from under the floor of Clayton Valley.
Erected by Nevada State Historic Preservation Office
The Story
Silver Peak ranks among Nevada's oldest mining districts, running a 10-stamp mill by 1865 and a 20-stamp mill two years later amid the lawlessness of a frontier camp. In 1906 the Pittsburg Silver Peak Gold Mining Company consolidated the area's properties, built the Silver Peak Railroad, and raised a 100-stamp mill at nearby Blair. The town rose and fell over decades, was abandoned by 1917, and burned in 1948—until the Foote Mineral Company began drawing lithium from beneath Clayton Valley.
Why it matters
Silver Peak bridges the silver-and-gold era and the modern age, its lithium mining a rare link between the old West's boomtowns and the mineral demands of today's technology.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Columbus
Esmeralda County, NV
Columbus took root on the edge of a salt marsh in 1865, when a quartz mill rose at the only spot for miles with water enough to run it. Its real fortune arrived in 1871, when William Troop discovered borax on the marsh and four companies rushed in to work the deposits. At its 1875 peak the town held around 1,000 people, a post office, and a newspaper aptly named The Borax Miner — but once the borax played out, Columbus faded, all but abandoned by the early 1880s.
Blair
Esmeralda County, NV
When the Pittsburgh-Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought up the major mines in 1906 and found land speculators had cornered nearby Silver Peak, it simply surveyed its own townsite to the north and named it Blair. The company built a 100-stamp mill in 1907 and ran a 17½-mile railroad from Blair Junction to the Tonopah & Goldfield main line. Yet the boom was brief: by 1920 Blair was all but deserted, leaving stone-building remnants and mill foundations as its only survivors.
Candelaria and Metallic City
Mineral County, NV
Seven miles west lie the ghost towns of Candelaria and Metallic City, born of the silver mines opened in this district in the 1860s. Candelaria — its name drawn from a mine and ultimately the Catholic feast of Candlemas — grew by 1880 into the area's largest town, with three doctors, three lawyers, two hotels, six stores, and ten saloons. Its leading mine, the Northern Belle, was located in 1864 and developed after 1870 to yield an estimated $7 million, chiefly in silver, and piped-in water eventually dropped the price from a dollar to a nickel a gallon.
Millers
Esmeralda County, NV
Millers owed its existence to the railroad, founded in 1904 as a watering stop on the Tonopah and Goldfield line and named for Charles R. Miller, a railroad director and former governor of Delaware. His influence helped bring a hundred-stamp cyanide mill to town in 1906, and a year later the railroad's repair shops and a second mill set off a brief boom that pushed the population toward three hundred. But by 1911 the shops and a mill had been carted off, the town began to fade, and it was finally abandoned when the railroad shut down in 1947.