State Printing Building
Carson City, Carson City, Nevada
Marker Inscription
State Printing Building. Completed in 1886, the State Printing Building is the second oldest structure built by the State within the Capitol Complex. Architects Morrill J. Curtis and Seymore Pixley, designed the Italianate structure to compliment the older State Capitol (1870). Curtis was responsible for many significant buildings throughout Nevada and the West, including the octagonal library annex to the rear of the State Capitol (1906). Like many important structures in Carson City, this building was constructed of sandstone ashlar quarried at the nearby State Prison and is a significant example of state governmental architecture for the period. From 1886 to 1964, this building housed the offices and presses of the State Printer.
Erected by Division Of Historic Preservation And Archaeologynevada State Librarydivision Of Archives And Records
The Story
Completed in 1886, the State Printing Building is the second oldest structure the State of Nevada raised within its Capitol Complex. Architects Morrill J. Curtis and Seymore Pixley designed the Italianate building to complement the 1870 State Capitol, using sandstone ashlar quarried at the nearby state prison—a signature material of Carson City's public buildings. For nearly eighty years, until 1964, it housed the offices and presses of the State Printer.
Why it matters
It reflects the machinery of a young state building its institutions, from a capitol to an official press, in the decades after Nevada's 1864 statehood.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Nevada became a state in 1864, rushed into the Union during the Civil War, and the decades that followed were a period of institution-building — of a young state assembling the physical machinery of government. In its capital, Carson City, that meant a growing complex of public buildings meant to house the work of governing.
This marker stands at one of them, a structure completed in 1886, during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era. By then the State Capitol itself had stood since 1870, and the newer building was designed to complement it — part of a deliberate architectural family rather than a stray addition.
Its Italianate style, popular for public and commercial buildings of the period, gave it a dignified, ordered look suited to official business. It was, and remains, a significant example of state governmental architecture from that formative time.
People & events
The building was the work of architects Morrill J. Curtis and Seymore Pixley, who shaped its Italianate design to harmonize with the older Capitol nearby. Curtis in particular left a wide mark: he was responsible for many significant buildings across Nevada and the West, including the octagonal library annex added behind the State Capitol in 1906.
Just as telling as the design is the material. Like many of Carson City's important structures, this one was built of sandstone ashlar — squared, finished blocks — quarried at the nearby state prison. That local stone gives the city's public buildings a shared character, and it ties this structure to a distinctive Carson City building tradition.
And then there is the work that went on inside. From 1886 until 1964 — nearly eighty years — this building housed the offices and presses of the State Printer, the official machinery through which the state's laws, records, and documents were put into print.
Its place in the American story
The State Printing Building embodies a chapter in the American story that is easy to overlook: the unglamorous, essential business of how a government makes itself real on paper. Laws, journals, reports, and official records all had to be printed and preserved, and a dedicated state printing operation was part of how a young state took its place among the others.
It also reflects a broader nineteenth-century pattern of capital-building across the growing United States. As new states matured, they raised capitols, libraries, and printing offices — a coherent set of public buildings that expressed permanence and legitimacy. This structure, second oldest that the state raised within its Capitol Complex, is a small monument to that ambition.
Even its stone carries meaning. Public buildings quarried from local material, worked by local labor, rooted a state's institutions physically in its own ground — a quiet assertion that these were places built to last.
If you visit
Look first at the stone. The sandstone ashlar came from the quarry at the nearby state prison, and once you know to notice it, you'll see the same material echoing across Carson City's older public buildings — a visual thread that ties the capital together.
Then set the building beside its neighbor, the 1870 State Capitol, and see how the architects meant them to speak to each other. The Italianate lines were chosen to complement, not compete, and reading the two together shows you how a capital complex was composed as a whole rather than assembled piecemeal.
As part of a walk through Carson City's historic core, this is a stop that rewards a slower look. Picture the presses that ran here for nearly eight decades, turning out the printed record of a state's public life, and you'll see an ordinary-looking building for what it really is — a workshop of government from Nevada's early decades.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Morrill J. Curtis
- · Seymore Pixley
Themes & tags
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