Spooner Area
Douglas County, Douglas County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Spooner Area (Logging And Lumbering Period: 1868 – 1895). This area bears the name of Michele E. Spooner, a French Canadian entrepreneur, who, along with others, was instrumental in establishing the wood and lumber industry which supplied the needs of the Comstock mines and mills.In 1868 Spooner became a partner with Oliver and John Lonkey, the Elliot brothers, Henry M. Yerington, William Fairburn and Simon Dubois in the Summit Fluming Company and operated a shingle mill and sawmill. In 1870 Yerington, Bliss & Company took over the summit fluming company.In 1873 another sawmill was erected at Spooner Meadows. Later in 1873, all the mills were taken over by the Carson & Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company. This company, headquartered at Glenbrook, went on to become the largest of the three huge companies supplying wood and lumber to the Comstock.
Erected by Division Of State Parks
The Story
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.
Why it matters
The Spooner works illustrate how quickly independent frontier sawmills were consolidated into industrial giants to satisfy the mines — a pattern of corporate concentration that reshaped the Western economy.
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Related people
- · Michele E. Spooner
- · Henry M. Yerington
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Spooner Summit Toll Roads
Douglas County, NV
Spooner Summit sat at the heart of the road and timber network that fed the Comstock Lode. After the 1859 silver strike, toll roads like the Rufus Walton route carried a torrent of traffic between Placerville and the boomtowns, while the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, formed in 1873, ran a narrow-gauge railway and an eleven-mile V-flume to send Tahoe Basin timber down to the mines — as much as 300,000 board feet a day. In 1913 the same corridor was chosen for the transcontinental Lincoln Highway, and successive improvements through the 1920s and 1950s turned the old bonanza wagon road into modern U.S. 50.
Glenbrook
Douglas County, NV
Beginning in 1861, the forests around Glenbrook on Lake Tahoe were logged to feed the insatiable timber demand of the Comstock mines, whose tunnels required vast quantities of shoring and whose mills burned mountains of cordwood. Under Duane Bliss, the Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company became the largest such operation, running sawmills, steam tugs, logging railroads, and V-flumes that floated wood to Carson City. Over its lifetime it stripped some 750 million board feet of lumber from the Tahoe basin before timber depletion and declining mining closed it in 1898.
Sand Harbor
Washoe County, NV
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.
Gardner's Ranch
Carson City, NV
From 1870 to 1918 this site held the ornate two-story home of Matthew Culbertson Gardner, rancher and lumberman, headquarters of his 300-acre ranch in the meadows to the south. Alongside it stood the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company's great lumberyard, and through the 1870s and 1880s Gardner logged south of Lake Tahoe—building the only standard-gauge logging railroad in the Tahoe Basin. Gardner died in 1908, and fire consumed the house in 1918, leaving only old shade trees behind.