Historic Markers in Nevada

Elko, NV

Elko was born of the railroad at the very end of 1868, when Central Pacific crews staked out lots that filled almost overnight, and within two years thousands of people made it a bustling freight and passenger gateway to the mining country north and south. It even hosted the University of Nevada from 1874 until the school moved to Reno in 1885. By the 1870s Elko had become the marketing heart of northeastern Nevada's vast rangelands, home to cattle barons and governors alike, and it remains the region's economic hub and host of the celebrated Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Elko, NV

On an April morning in 1926, Varney Air Lines pilot Leon Cuddeback set his little Curtiss Swallow biplane down at Elko with a single sack of mail, completing the first scheduled airmail flight in the United States. The ninety-horsepower plane had lifted off from Pasco, Washington, refueled at Boise, and covered some 460 miles to reach Nevada under a fresh federal contract. Varney's modest venture proved the commercial promise of flying the mail; the company was later sold to Boeing and folded into United Airlines.

Reno, NV

As California-bound emigrants reached the Truckee Meadows, they turned their wagons southwest to skirt impassable marshes, gathering at this sprawling campground at the foot of Rattlesnake Mountain. Fed by local springs, it was an ideal place to rest and graze exhausted animals before the daunting climb over the Sierra Nevada. In October 1846 the ill-fated Donner Party spent five days here; during that stay one member, William Pike, was accidentally shot and buried nearby.

Carson City, NV

When the Comstock Lode broke open in 1859, the riddle of how to crush and reduce its fabulously rich ore fell to a string of mills, and the Carson River — with its steady water power — became the answer. Beginning with a small mill in 1860 that grew into the Mexican, a line of works rose downstream, feeding the town of Empire and producing fortunes in gold and silver for more than forty years. Ore first came by wagon and later aboard the famed Virginia and Truckee Railroad, built in 1869, past mills with names like Yellow Jacket, Brunswick, and Santiago.

Eureka County, NV

According to local lore a miner cried "Eureka!" when he struck rich ore here in September 1864, and the town took its name from the shout. Eureka went on to develop the nation's first important lead-silver deposits, and during its furious 1880s boom it boasted 16 smelters, more than 100 saloons, a population of 10,000, and its own colorful railroad — the Eureka and Palisade — reaching 90 miles north to the transcontinental line. Production began slipping in 1883, the smelters shut by 1891, and their sites are still marked by the great slag piles at either end of Main Street.

Eureka County, NV

Designed by George Costerisa and built in 1879–80 from locally fired brick and nearby sandstone, the Italianate Eureka County Courthouse cost about $38,000 and remains a striking example of boomtown Victorian opulence. It presided over many famous trials during Eureka's heyday, when the town reigned from 1864 to 1890 as the first major lead-silver district in the United States.

Eureka County, NV

Built in 1879 for $10,000 to designs by architect C.M. Bennett, the Sentinel Building housed the Eureka Sentinel newspaper from 1879 to 1960. Three generations of the Skillman family—Archibald, Edward, and Willis—guided the paper through the decades. Its last editor, Edward J. Moyle, had already given the Sentinel more than fifty years before taking the editorial chair in 1944.

Churchill County, NV

Fairview rose out of the same wave of optimism that Tonopah and Goldfield set off, when an 1905 strike of rich silver float sparked a rush that peaked across 1906–1907. At its height the town claimed 27 saloons, hotels, banks, assay offices, a newspaper, and a miners' union hall. The first frenzy soon passed, but the Nevada Hills Mining Company sustained profitable milling from 1911 to 1917, drawing $3.8 million in silver — with prominent promoters George Wingfield and George Nixon among the early backers.

Carson City, NV

On June 23, 1910, aviation pioneer Ivy Baldwin—already famous as a balloonist and parachutist—lifted a 48-horsepower Curtiss biplane off the old Raycraft Ranch west of Carson City, making the first airplane flight in Nevada. The trial run, staged for the Sagebrush Carnival, drew national notice partly because it happened at an unusually high 4,675-foot altitude. Baldwin climbed to 50 feet and covered half a mile before circling back, a modest hop that heralded a new age.

Esmeralda County, NV

Fish Lake Valley drew its first settlers after the Palmetto mining district was discovered in 1866, and by the 1870s firms including the Pacific Borax Works were extracting borax from the lake. The Carson and Columbus stage line ran north toward Aurora and Carson City, and local ranches supplied food to the freight and mining trade, with a post office opening in 1881. The marker also honors W.O. Harrell, remembered as a colorful "citizen extraordinaire" of the valley.

Elko County, NV

Established in July 1867 by Captain Samuel Smith, Fort Halleck stood guard over the California Emigrant Trail, the Overland mail route, and the advancing Central Pacific Railroad during conflicts with the Goshute and Western Shoshone. Named for Civil War general-in-chief Henry Wager Halleck, it grew into a 20-building post and headquarters for the Nevada Military District. Its troops ranged far afield—against the Modoc in 1873, the Nez Perce in 1877, the Bannock in 1878, and the Apache in 1885. As the frontier quieted, the Army closed the fort in December 1886.

Humboldt County, NV

Established in 1865 as Quinn River Camp #33, this post was renamed Fort McDermitt for a district commander killed while fighting Native peoples. A cluster of adobe, stone, and frame buildings around a central square, it guarded the road linking Virginia City, the Quinn River Valley, and Oregon. Its troops took part in the Modoc War and in campaigns against the Bannock and Shoshone, and after twenty-four years—the longest active service of any Nevada army fort—it became an American Indian reservation school in 1889.

Churchill County, NV

The Forty Mile Desert, beginning here, was a barren stretch of waterless alkali that emigrants regarded as the most dreaded section of the California Trail — many crossed it by night to escape the punishing heat. The Walker-Chiles Party first brought wagons through in 1843, and despite its horrors the route became the accepted path, splitting into the Carson and Truckee River trails. An 1850 survey tallied the grim toll: more than 1,000 dead mules, nearly 5,000 horses, thousands of cattle, and 953 graves.

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.

Reno, NV

Frederic Joseph DeLongchamps was the most prolific and celebrated Nevada architect of the early twentieth century, shaping the civic face of Reno and towns across the state. From this vantage stand several of his works — the U.S. Post Office, the Riverside Hotel, the Washoe County Courthouse, and the Reno National Bank Building — that together form a monument to his career. The American Institute of Architects placed this marker to honor his legacy.

Washoe County, NV

Galena began in 1860 as both a lumbering center and a mining camp when R. S. and Andrew Hatch laid out the town and organized a mining district. Their quartz mill and smelter were among the earliest on this side of the Sierra, but the local gold was locked in a troublesome lead sulphide — galena — that made mining unprofitable, so the mills turned instead to processing Comstock ores. Eleven sawmills operated by 1863, supporting stores, a school, and dozens of homes, until a hard winter, mining depression, and two fires left the town abandoned by 1867.

Washoe County, NV

The Comstock Lode's silver bonanza of the 1860s and 1870s devoured the region's forests and fisheries to feed a booming population, and by the twentieth century restocking depleted waters had become a public priority. Washoe County ran the Galena Creek Fish Hatchery from 1931 to 1949, drawing on the creek's clean, steady flow. Its story reflects a broader 1920s movement to pair habitat conservation with outdoor recreation, and the site later passed to Boy Scouts, Camp Fire, and archery clubs before becoming part of Galena Creek Regional Park.

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.

Douglas County, NV

Gardnerville grew up after 1879 on John M. Gardner's homestead, serving farmers and teamsters who hauled produce to the booming mining camp of Bodie. Where nearby Genoa had drawn British and Mormon settlers, Gardnerville became a hub for Danish immigrants, who founded the Valhalla Society in 1885. From 1898 onward, Basque shepherds from Spain and France tended tens of thousands of sheep in Carson Valley, and Basque-run inns later flourished through Prohibition.

Washoe County, NV

In the boom decades of Nevada's Comstock Lode, the Geiger Grade Toll Road carried silver-rush traffic between the mines of Virginia City and the ranches of the Truckee Meadows, and Geiger's Station was its busiest stop. With a toll house, blacksmith shops, barns, corrals, and the Magnolia House inn, it was a crossroads of freight outfits, stagecoaches, and weary teamsters. When the Virginia & Truckee Railroad reached Reno in 1872, the toll road faded, but the inn kept hosting travelers and dances until 1915.

Washoe County, NV

Set between the Black Rock and Smoke Creek deserts, Gerlach lies in country peopled for thousands of years by the Northern Paiute. John C. Frémont camped here in 1843 and named the nearby Boiling Springs, and later this was emigrant ground, where the Nobles Road branched off the Applegate-Lassen Trail and pushed southwest toward Susanville. The town itself took shape only after the Western Pacific Railroad laid track through the region between 1905 and 1909.

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.

Sparks, NV

Glendale was a settlement older than Reno, once expected to become the metropolis on the Truckee River—until the Central Pacific Railroad was lured to a station at Lake's Crossing, the future Reno, instead. Teacher E.C. Sessions organized the community's school in his own home before this building, built by Archie Bryant for $1,446, opened in 1864. Generations of Nevadans learned here, among them U.S. Senator Patrick A. McCarran, and the well-crafted structure survived two moves to reach its present site by 1993.

Humboldt County, NV

Golconda began as a Utah Territory mining town and a welcome landmark on the California Emigrant Trail, best known for the hot springs that fed a swanky resort hotel staffed by doctors. Its fortunes rose with the rails: in 1868 it became an ore-shipping point on the new Central Pacific, and renewed mining in 1897 prompted a short narrow-gauge line running south to the Adelaide mine. The town swelled to some five hundred residents by 1899, only to slump the following year when the mine and mill closed and rail service to the mine ended.

Esmeralda County, NV

First called Lime Point for deposits found in 1868, this camp was reborn after the great Goldfield strikes of 1902 drew prospectors to the district. In 1908 miners uncovered rich hornsilver, renamed the town Hornsilver, and threw up more than 225 wood-frame buildings, tents, and shacks with a newspaper, post office, stores, and saloons. Renamed Gold Point after 1930 as gold outpaced silver, the camp faded when World War II drew its miners away to essential wartime industries in 1942.

Esmeralda County, NV

After two decades of decline that drained a third of Nevada's population, the state's fortunes turned overnight with rich strikes at Tonopah and, in December 1902, here at Goldfield. Nevada-born prospectors Harry Stimler and Billy Marsh found gold ore, and from 1904 to 1918 Goldfield boomed into the state's largest city, peaking near 20,000 people with a railroad linking it to Las Vegas. Before the mines gave out, they yielded more than $86 million in precious metals.

Clark County, NV

The folded limestone of this district held ore that went unworked until the mid-1850s, when Mormon settlers opened work at Potosi, among the earliest underground mines in Nevada. Named for cattleman Joseph Good, the springs grew into the ranching-and-mining community of Goodsprings, and the arrival of the Los Angeles-Salt Lake Railroad in 1905 and a narrow-gauge feeder line in 1911 cut the cost of shipping its zinc ores. Operations peaked in 1916 with some eight hundred residents, and the district—unusually rich in minerals—ultimately produced about twenty-five million dollars, chiefly in lead and zinc.

Washoe County, NV

Emmet Derby Boyle (1879–1926) rose from the mining town of Goldhill to become, at thirty-five, the youngest governor in Nevada history and the first born within the state's own borders. Serving from 1915 to 1923, he modernized Nevada's government with its first executive budget and helped shape the water law of an arid state. A committed supporter of suffrage, he called the legislature into special session in 1920 so Nevada could ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

Reno, NV

In 1890 the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the great fraternal organization of Union veterans — bought seventeen lots in Reno's Hillside Cemetery as a final resting place for its Civil War comrades. Among those buried here are Nevada volunteers who served across their own state and the neighboring West from 1861 to 1866. After decades of neglect and vandalism, the Daughters of Union Veterans and local citizens began restoring the plot in 1963.

Reno, NV

This tree was planted in soil gathered from Civil War battlefields and dedicated in June 1913 by the national commander-in-chief to honor the Grand Army of the Republic, the great fraternal order of Union veterans. In 1969 it was rededicated by the Sons and Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War in Reno, keeping the memory of those soldiers alive into the 20th century.

Churchill County, NV

Grimes Point holds one of northern Nevada's largest and most accessible rock-art sites — roughly 150 basalt boulders bearing more than 1,000 petroglyphs. These carvings held magico-religious meaning, made in ritual by a group leader before communal hunts to ensure success, and the ridge above still shows traces of an aboriginal drift fence used to drive deer or antelope. Archaeologists estimate the petroglyphs date between about 2,500 and 500 years ago.

Lyon County, NV

In the early 1850s Spafford Hall, the area's first permanent settler, built a station and trading post here to serve emigrants pressing on toward California. After a hunting injury in 1854 he sold out, and the post passed through several hands — becoming McMarlin's Station and later belonging to Major Ormsby, who died in 1860 at the first battle of the Pyramid Lake War. The site is also remembered as the place where the area's first recorded dance was held on New Year's Eve, 1853.

White Pine County, NV

The White Pine mining district, opened in 1865, exploded after major silver discoveries in 1868 into one of the most intense—and briefest—stampedes ever recorded, with some 10,000 people crowding huts and caves on Treasure Hill at elevations near two miles high. Hamilton was incorporated in 1869 and became White Pine County's first seat, sprouting a full town with a brick courthouse by 1870. A devastating fire in June 1873 gutted the main street, and the town never recovered; a second blaze in 1885 destroyed the courthouse and moved the county seat to Ely. Hamilton and its neighbors are ghost towns today.

Mineral County, NV

Hawthorne was laid out in 1880 by Carson and Colorado Railroad president H. M. Yerington as a division point, named for pioneer lumberman William A. Hawthorne rather than its planned name of Millbrae. The town seesawed through Nevada's county-seat rivalries—taking the Esmeralda seat from Aurora in 1883, losing it to Goldfield in 1907, and becoming Mineral County's seat in 1911. Its fortunes turned again in the late 1920s when the Navy, after a disastrous eastern munitions explosion, chose Hawthorne for a huge ammunition depot, commissioned in 1930.

Churchill County, NV

Hazen sprang up in 1903 as a rough-and-tumble camp housing laborers on the federal Newlands irrigation project, one of the first reclamation efforts to green the Nevada desert. When the railroad to Tonopah arrived in 1905 and the Southern Pacific built a roundhouse and depot the next year, the town of hotels, saloons, and brothels boomed—alongside a reputation for lawlessness that included the 1905 lynching of 'Red' Wood. Fire nearly wiped it out in 1908, and the town named for Civil War general William B. Hazen never fully recovered.

Lander County, NV

For untold generations before European contact, Great Basin peoples worked the pass near Hickison Summit, funneling migratory deer herds toward a natural ambush between low buttes. Success took the coordinated effort of several families to trap, kill, and process the animals. On the rock walls they left three panels of petroglyphs, images tied to the ritual and spiritual life of the hunt, pecked seasonally by a group's shaman as omens for a good season.

Washoe County, NV

High Rock Canyon holds a record of human presence stretching from around 3,000 B.C. to the gold rush, written on its towering volcanic walls in rockshelters, campsites, and petroglyphs. Northern Paiute people ranged this remote country when John C. Frémont passed through in 1843. Soon after, the Applegate brothers blazed an emigrant trail through the canyon in 1846, Peter Lassen followed part of the route in 1848, and by 1849 gold seekers crowded the narrow passage westward.

Lincoln County, NV

Founded as a camp around 1865 and laid out as a townsite in 1866, Hiko took its name from a Shoshone word meaning roughly 'white man' or 'white man's town.' W. H. Raymond hauled a five-stamp mill up the Colorado River to Callville and then 140 miles overland by oxen to process Pahranagat ores, and in late 1866 Hiko became Lincoln County's first county seat. Raymond poured nearly $900,000 into the district before it failed, and after the mill moved to Bullionville in 1870 and the county seat to Pioche in 1871, the town declined.

Carson City, NV

Half a mile south of here once sprawled the yard of the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, the greatest of the Comstock timber operations working the Lake Tahoe Basin from 1870 to 1898. Rough lumber and cordwood arrived down a 12-mile V-flume from Spooner's Summit in the Sierra, filling a yard a mile long and half a mile wide. A spur of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad then carried the timber onward to feed the mines and mills of the Comstock.

Reno, NV

This building preserves the Huffaker Ranch House, a survivor of the early ranching era in the Truckee Meadows south of Reno. The Huffaker name belonged to a pioneering family that raised stock and farmed the valley in the decades after Nevada's mining rushes drew settlers to the region. The old ranch house anchors that frontier-agricultural past amid modern development.

Washoe County, NV

The corridor from the Truckee Meadows toward Honey Lake is a palimpsest of American travel, layering emigrant-trail cutoffs, toll roads, county roads, and finally U.S. 395 and the interstate over the same ground. In 1851 the famed frontiersman James Beckwourth cut a wagon road here toward Marysville; toll operators like Myron Lake later profited from the constant flow of freight and stages between the Comstock mines and the Sierra ranches. The Peavine Ranch, where this marker stands, once offered travelers a bed and a well-stocked bar.

Clark County, NV

Completed in 1935 across the Colorado River's Black Canyon, Hoover Dam was one of the greatest engineering feats of its age, built during the Great Depression to tame floods, store water, and generate hydroelectric power for the fast-growing Southwest. Thousands of workers labored in brutal desert heat to raise its massive concrete arch, and many died in the effort this plaque honors.

Reno, NV

When Granville W. Huffaker drove 500 head of cattle into the Truckee Meadows in 1858, the valley's main settlers were Mormons; he established his ranch the following year just as the Comstock Lode focused new attention on the region. Through the 1860s Huffaker's grew into a bustling stage stop and community center, with a stage line, post office, and an 1868 schoolhouse, hosting dances, horse races, and even a literary society. In 1875 the "Bonanza Kings" completed their great lumber flume from the Tahoe basin to a nearby terminus, where the Virginia and Truckee Railroad built a depot and spur to transfer the timber.

Pershing County, NV

Humboldt House began as the departure point for Humboldt City and nearby mines, became a stage stop on the Beachey line in 1866, and reached its heyday when the Central Pacific railhead arrived in September 1868. From 1869 to 1900 it was celebrated as one of the finest eating-houses on the Central Pacific — a true desert oasis of good water, fruit, and vegetables. The site also stood along the California emigrant trail, where in 1850 alone travelers counted over 9,700 dead animals and 3,000 abandoned wagons on the nearby Forty Mile Desert.

Humboldt County, NV

Fur trapper Peter Skene Ogden reached this river on November 9, 1828, during his fifth Snake Country expedition, exploring hundreds of square miles of its course and drafting the first map of the region. Unsure where it led, he called it the "Unknown River," later renaming it Paul's, Swampy, and finally Mary's River before it became known as the Humboldt. As the only natural artery across the Great Basin, the river funneled thousands of emigrants toward the Pacific between 1841 and 1870.

Wells, NV

These marshy springs in the meadows were Humboldt Wells, a vital oasis on the California Emigrant Trail. Between 1845 and 1869, hundreds of covered-wagon trains halted here to rest and refit before the grueling 300-mile push down the Humboldt Valley. Deep ruts worn by their passage can still be traced on the surrounding slopes. When the Central Pacific Railroad built a station in 1869, it borrowed the springs' name, later shortened to Wells.

Lander County, NV

Built in 1863 from lumber salvaged from Virginia City's first International Hotel, this was the first commercial building raised in the new silver camp of Austin. David E. Buel put it up after being refused a free lot down the canyon in Clifton — and Buel, along with Frederick Baker, W. C. Harrington, and John Veatch, went on to locate and record Austin's original townsite. The hotel thus stood at the very founding of one of central Nevada's great Reese River mining towns.

Nye County, NV

Ione Valley sustained a dense Indigenous population for roughly 5,000 years, and the Shoshone and Northern Paiute who lived here later practiced distinctive property and agricultural customs. When silver was struck in 1863, Ione City boomed to more than 600 residents and in 1864 became the first county seat of newly created Nye County. Its glory was brief—Belmont's wealth pulled away both the miners and, by 1867, the county seat—yet Ione proved resilient, never wholly deserted through decades of mining slumps.

Lincoln County, NV

Local legend says the Jackrabbit lode was found when a prospector reached for a rock to throw at a jackrabbit and came up holding high-grade silver. Located in 1876 by Isaac Newton Garrison, the district — its camp once called Royal City — shipped about ten tons of silver-bearing ore a day, occasionally assaying as high as $2,000 per ton. Production sagged in the 1880s but revived after an 1891 narrow-gauge railroad linked the mine to Pioche, before the mines fell largely silent after 1893.

Lander County, NV

Founded on the banks of the Reese River in 1859 by George Washington Jacobs, Lander County's first sheriff, Jacobsville served as an Overland Stage and mail station and became a Pony Express stop in 1860. In its early-1860s prime it held some 400 people and claimed the first telegraph relay station, a post office, courthouse, three stores, and two hotels, and was the first seat of a Lander County that then sprawled across northeastern Nevada. The seat soon moved to booming Austin, and today only a few foundation stones remain.

Carson City, NV

On St. Patrick's Day 1897, Carson City hosted Nevada's first world heavyweight championship prizefight, staged in a purpose-built arena after the state legislature legalized the sport. Over fourteen rounds, challenger Robert Fitzsimmons dethroned the reigning champion, 'Gentleman Jim' Corbett, before thousands of fans. Promoter Dan Stuart ran a clean, well-managed show despite fierce criticism from pulpits and newspapers elsewhere.

Elko County, NV

The Jarbidge country has drawn people for a very long time—Native hunting parties camped here as early as 10,000 years ago, and Shoshone-speaking peoples who arrived about a thousand years ago still live in the region; the very name comes from a Shoshone word for an evil spirit. Dave Bourne's 1909 gold strike in this remote canyon sparked a rush that by the early 1920s made Jarbidge Nevada's leading gold producer, eclipsing fading Goldfield. It also holds a colorful footnote: the last stagecoach robbery and murder in the West, on a stormy December day in 1916.

Elko County, NV

Dave Bourne's gold discovery in 1909 gave rise to the town of Jarbidge, and within a year some 1,500 people crowded its steep canyon. The community built this pioneer-style hall, famous for its "floating" maple dance floor, as a gathering place for the boomtown. Long after the rush faded, support from the Nevada Commission for Cultural Affairs and local residents funded the building's restoration, keeping a piece of the mining frontier standing.

White Pine County, NV

Between May and June of 1827, explorer and trapper Jedediah Strong Smith forced a route from California's Central Valley to Utah's Great Salt Lake Valley, becoming the first known European American to cross the entire expanse of present-day Nevada. Because his journal and map were lost, his exact path is uncertain, but historians trace him over the Sierra at Ebbetts Pass, southeast along the Walker River, and northeast across central Nevada's Smoky Valley toward Utah.

Reno, NV

At this crossing of the Truckee Meadows, one of pioneer Nevada's busiest crossroads took shape. By 1853 Junction House had become the valley's first permanent settlement and a stopping place for thousands of emigrants. It anchored a web of toll roads in the 1860s — the turnpikes to Washoe City and Virginia City, the Myron Lake Road, and the important Henness Pass route to California. Governor John Sparks later owned the property.

Douglas County, NV

In the frantic years after silver was struck on the Comstock Lode, getting men and freight over the Sierra crest became big business. In 1859–1860 David Kingsbury and John McDonald secured a franchise from the Utah Territory and spent roughly $70,000 carving a sixteen-foot wagon road—braced in places by granite retaining walls—up what had been the Georgetown and Daggett Pass trail. The new grade shortened the haul between Sacramento and Virginia City and quickly filled with merchants and teamsters paying tolls to reach the Washoe mines.

North Las Vegas, NV

Established by Conrad Kiel in 1875, this was one of only two major ranches in the Las Vegas valley through the 19th century, and its early years were steeped in violence — rancher Archibald Stewart was killed here in a gunfight in 1884, and two of Kiel's sons were found murdered on the property in 1900. After a railroad bought the land in 1903, Las Vegas banker John S. Park built the elegant white mansion, and later owners turned it into a cowboy ranch and even a dude ranch catering to divorce seekers. In 1976 the City of North Las Vegas preserved 26 acres of the original ranch as a historic site.

Churchill County, NV

Completed in 1915, Lahontan Dam is the centerpiece of the Newlands Project, which transformed the Lahontan Valley into one of Nevada's most productive farming and ranching regions and supplied electricity to Churchill County. The project was among the first authorized under the federal Reclamation Act of 1902, and its 1903 contract for Derby Dam and the Truckee Canal was the U.S. Reclamation Service's very first. Originally the Truckee-Carson Project, it was renamed in 1919 for Senator Francis G. Newlands, a champion of federal reclamation.

Reno, NV

Built in 1877 by Washington J. Marsh, this handsome mansion was the home of Myron C. Lake, the toll-bridge and hotel keeper whose landholdings on the Truckee River gave rise to the city of Reno. Lake shrewdly donated land to the Central Pacific Railroad to ensure a townsite depot, and the settlement that grew around it made his fortune. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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.