Spooner Summit Toll Roads
Douglas County, Douglas County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Spooner Summit TOLL ROADS Johnson’s Cutoff, also called the Carson Ridge Emigrant Road, passed over Spooner Summit and down Clear Creek Road from 1852 through 1854, but was rugged and little used. With discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, Spooner Summit became a focal point on the most heavily traveled branch of the bonanza road system linking Placerville, California, and the new towns east of the Sierra Nevada. Territorial governments granted franchisces to provide individuals or companies, allowing them to build and maintain toll roads. The Rufus Walton (Clear Creek) Toll Road replaced Johnson’s Cutoff in 1860, providing a better route around the southeast shore of Lake Tahoe via Glenbrook. LUMBER FOR THE COMSTOCK Massive amounts of wood were sent to the Comstock Lode from the Carson Range and the Tahoe Basin. Initially wood was hauled by wagon, but soon the transport included trains, steamboats, and water flumes. Spooner Summit is in the midst of a former logging landscape. In 1873, logging in the area was consolidated by formation of the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company. Workers were housed at a small settlement called Summit Camp, built along one side of the toll road. From 1875 to 1898 the company operated the Lake Tahoe Railroad along 8.75 miles of the line from Glenbrook to this spot. The difficult route included switchbacks and a 487-foot tunnel just west of the summit. The narrow-gauge railroad’s sole purpose was to haul timber and lumber for building purposes and cordwood for fuel. This wood was transferred to an 11-mile long V-flume that extended from Spooner Summit down Clear Creek to Carson Valley. There the wood was loaded on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad for the rest of its trip to the Comstock. At its peak the Comstock consumed about 80 million board feet of lumber and 2 million cords of firewood each year. About 300,000 board feet of wood passed over Spooner Summit each day. This route was improved in 1863 with the completion of the Lake Tahoe (Bigler) Wagon Road, also called the Kings Canyon Road. About 5,000 teamsters were moving goods along roads leading to the Comstock in 1863, but traffic began to decline in 1875. Stations were built at convenient intervals along the roads. Swift’s Station was about two miles east of Spooner Summit on the Kings Canyon Road. In 1863, Spooner’s Station, located near the current junction of US 50 and SR 28 (a mile west of here), had a hotel, saloon, houses, blacksmith shop, and two barns. EARLY MORNING Introduction of automobiles into the Tahoe Basin rapidly changed the character of the place, making it accessible for far more people as a growing tourist destination. Early in the twentieth century, the decaying bonanza system of wagon roads had to serve the needs of the automobile travelers. In 1913, the Lincoln Highway Association designated the road up Kings Canyon, over Spooner Summit, and through Glenbrook as part of the Lincoln Highway. The highway was a private concept intended to enhance long-distance automobile travel by establishing the first transcontinental route. Actual work on this section began in 1914 when the Carson Good Roads Association placed redwood markers every mile. Each marker displayed the highway symbol and distances to Carson City, Glenbrook, and San Francisco. During this period one motorist described part of the road as “a narrow shelf along a barren, rocky mountain side.” Little more than light maintenance was done on the road even after it was included in the Nevada State Highway System as part of Route 3. In 1923, the portion of Route 3 between Spooner’s Station and the state line was incorporated into the Forest Highway System, making funding available for major improvements. In 1927 and 1928, a graded two-lane automobile road was built along Clear Creek, over Spooner Summit, and on to Glenbrook. A combination of state and Forest Highway funds paid for the work. The new road became part of US 50. In the 1930s, the road was oiled and surfaced with asphalt. Snow removal allowed year-round access to the lake. Finally, in the late 1950s, this portion of US 50 was upgraded to the present two lanes.
Erected by Nevada State Historic Preservation Office
The Story
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.
Why it matters
This one mountain pass tells the whole arc of Western development — mining, industrial logging, and the coming of the automobile age — layered along a single ribbon of road.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Discovery of the Comstock Lode, 1859
- · Designation of the Lincoln Highway, 1913
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
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.