Historic Markers in Nevada

Carson City, NV

Built around 1860 by Abraham Curry, co-founder of Carson City, the Warm Springs Hotel was a grand structure of hand-hewn sandstone from a nearby quarry. Nevada's first Territorial Legislature met here in 1861, and in 1862 Curry leased part of the building to hold prisoners—the seed of the Nevada State Prison, which the state purchased in 1864. For nearly a century, inmates cut the distinctive sandstone that built the State Capitol, the U.S. Mint, and the prison itself.

Washoe County, NV

Completed around 1864, this large Gothic-style mansion was the home of Theodore and Maggie Winters and their seven children, built with proceeds from the Comstock on land the Winters brothers purchased from earlier Mormon settlers. Theodore expanded the property to some 6,000 acres, breeding outstanding race horses while also running a large dairy and raising cattle, work horses, and sheep. Active in politics, he was elected a territorial representative in 1862.

Nye County, NV

In May 1900, Nye County District Attorney Jim Butler made the discovery that ended a twenty-year slump in Nevada's economy — the Paiute had long used the name Tonopah for a spring in the nearby mountains. The strike proved to be the richest silver producer in the nation, spawning a railroad, great mills, and a population of some 10,000, and by 1905 it had taken the county seat from Belmont. Though the mines faltered in the 1920s, Tonopah's lasting fame rests on the financiers and politicians it launched.

Lander County, NV

High in the Toquima Range, this basalt cave holds walls and ceilings covered with pictographs in abstract and geometric designs painted in white, red, yellow, and black. Scholars believe the images—possibly ceremonial markers, visionary records, or art—were painted by the ancestors of the Western Shoshone who historically occupied the region. Today a protective enclosure shields the ancient paintings from vandalism while allowing visitors to view them.

Carson City, NV

The first authenticated flight over the Sierra Nevada ended here when four U.S. Army planes—three Liberty-powered DeHavillands and a Curtiss trainer—touched down on an improvised field after taking off from Mather Field near Sacramento. Governor Emmet D. Boyle personally welcomed the fliers, led by Lt. Col. Henry L. Watson, before the squadron continued on to Reno. On the return leg Boyle flew as a passenger, becoming the first civilian to cross the Sierra by air.

Washoe County, NV

The flats along the Truckee River were home to Native peoples for thousands of years, who fished with blinds and left petroglyphs on the surrounding boulders. After John C. Frémont recorded the river in 1844, it became a lifeline and a hazard for California-bound emigrants—among them the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party that crossed Donner Pass and the ill-fated Donner party, trapped by Sierra snows in 1846. The Central Pacific followed the river's course in 1868, and its route later matured through the Lincoln and Victory highways into U.S. 40 and Interstate 80.

Washoe County, NV

The Truckee River, flowing from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake, was first recorded by John C. Frémont in January 1844, who camped at its terminus and dubbed it the Salmon-Trout River before following it over Donner Pass. From the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party of 1844 onward it guided California emigrants until the Central Pacific Railroad closed the wagon era in 1868–1869. The old railroad grade later became a county road, then Nevada's Victory Highway, U.S. 40, and finally the first stretch of Interstate 80 across the state.

Las Vegas, NV

Tule Springs is one of the rare North American sites offering evidence of human presence stretching back many thousands of years, when this now-arid basin held sagebrush flats, yellow-pine forests, and abundant springs. Those waters drew Ice Age megafauna — ground sloths, mammoths, prehistoric horses, camels, and the first Nevada record of the extinct giant condor — and the early hunters who pursued them. Later desert-culture peoples lived here for millennia, subsisting on plants and small game, while the site's remarkably complete Pleistocene geology records it all.

Elko County, NV

Tuscarora sprang to life in 1867 when John and Steve Beard found placer gold, then boomed after W.O. Weed struck the rich Mount Blitzen silver lodes in 1871. Through its heyday from 1872 to 1884 the district produced tens of millions of dollars and swelled to over 3,000 people, including several hundred Chinese who worked the older placer diggings. Freight wagons and stagecoaches crowded the toll roads linking it to distant railheads. Production dwindled after 1895, and the camp limped on until 1917, with a modern mine reopening in 1987.

Douglas County, NV

Thomas Wheeler built the Twelve Mile House in 1859 where the East Fork of the Carson River emerges from Long Valley, naming it for its equal distance from Genoa and from the Cradlebaugh Bridge. A vital stop on the road to the Aurora mining camp, it sat at a busy crossroads with routes radiating toward Goldfield, Woodfords, Genoa, and Carson City. Mile houses like this supplied rest and provisions for travelers until the railroads made most of them obsolete.

Nye County, NV

About eight miles northwest lay Tybo, once among the nation's leading lead-producing districts, working ore erratically from its 1866 discovery until the last mill closed in 1937. A peaceful camp at first, Tybo later saw strife among its Irish, Cornish, and central European miners—groups who nonetheless united to drive off a company of Chinese woodcutters. The town kept three separate ethnic residential sections, yet all its children attended the same brick school.

Lyon County, NV

The Union Hotel was rebuilt on this spot in 1870 after fire destroyed the original across the street, its new quarters also housing a dining room and barber shop. Most telling is the free-standing rock wall here—the original wall of an overland stage station and Pony Express stop. Together they mark a waypoint on the great transportation routes that knit together the mid-nineteenth-century West.

Caliente, NV

Built in 1923 to replace a depot lost to fire two years earlier, this imposing Mission Revival station was designed by the noted Los Angeles architects John and Donald Parkinson. Its interior was finished largely in solid oak, and the roughly $80,000 complex once included a restaurant and a fifty-room hotel. Long a hub of railroad-town life, the building later became Caliente's civic center and the seat of city government.

Pershing County, NV

Silver drew settlers into Buena Vista Canyon in 1861, and Southern sympathizers first named their camp Dixie. The following year, as the Civil War divided the nation, the town's neutral and Northern factions won out and rechristened it Unionville. It became the seat of Humboldt County until losing that honor to Winnemucca in 1873, and though the ores thinned by the late 1870s, Unionville kept a reputation as a calmer, more comfortable place than most raucous mining camps.

Elko County, NV

During World War I, troop trains rolled regularly through Montello, and the Southern Pacific stationed a doctor to check every train for the influenza then sweeping the world. Ten soldiers who fell gravely ill in the 1918 epidemic died and were buried here namelessly, their identities lost when fires destroyed the government records. Long unmarked, the graves were finally given markers in 1975 through the efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Kimber of Montello and the veterans' 40 & 8 society of Las Vegas.

Humboldt County, NV

Established by the Southern Pacific in 1910 and named for the 1792 Battle of Valmy of the French Revolution, this railroad point served the steam era as a water and fuel stop above the old California Emigrant Trail. Nearby Treaty Hill carries an older story: it marked the boundary between Northern Paiute lands to the west and Shoshone lands to the east, and the place where, after generations of conflict over two springs, the tribes made peace by dividing the water and territory. The local post office, first called Stonehouse in 1890, took the name Valmy in 1915.

Washoe County, NV

Modern Verdi grew up with the Central Pacific Railroad that pushed through here between 1867 and 1869, becoming a major mill town and shipping terminal for railroad ties and timbers, fed by logging railways reaching into the surrounding forests. Its roots ran deeper still: an 1860 log bridge over the Truckee, O'Nell's Crossing, had served stagecoaches on the busy Henness Pass and Dutch Flat toll roads. Lumbermen like Oliver Lonkey kept Verdi active into the twentieth century until a 1926 fire and dwindling timber brought its decline.

Mesquite, NV

The Virgin Valley was a corridor of Western exploration and migration long before it was farmed. Jedediah Smith passed through in 1826 and John C. Frémont in 1844, and the valley carried both the Old Spanish Trail (1829–1848) and the Mormon Road toward southern California. Latter-day Saint pioneers put down permanent roots, founding Bunkerville in 1877 and Mesquite in 1880, drawing life from the waters of the Virgin River.

Reno, NV

The Virginia & Truckee Railroad, built between 1868 and 1872, linked the booming mining and milling towns of the Comstock to the transcontinental line at Reno. Chinese laborers graded this section in the summer of 1871, and track gangs quickly pushed south, reaching Steamboat Springs that October. Superintendent Henry M. Yerington drove the last spike near Carson City on August 24, 1872; the line's last train passed here on May 31, 1950.

Lyon County, NV

Wabuska took shape in the early 1870s as a station on the freight road running from the Central Pacific to the roaring mining camps of the Nevada-California borderlands. In 1881 it became the main supply and distribution center for Mason Valley on the new narrow-gauge Carson and Colorado Railroad, later bought and re-gauged by Southern Pacific, and the Tonopah and Goldfield booms swelled its traffic. When copper was found in Mason Valley, Wabuska became the northern terminus of the Nevada Copper Belt Railroad, only to wane as mining activity faded in the 1920s.

Washoe County, NV

From 1868 to 1884 this site held the Central Pacific's Truckee Wadsworth Division, a major railroad hub on the transcontinental line. A new roundhouse and shops were built across the river by 1883, but a wind-driven fire on April 15, 1884, destroyed the remaining buildings and much of the town, causing over $100,000 in damage worsened by scarce water. After a second fire in 1902, the railroad relocated its division facilities in 1904 to an entirely new site that became Sparks, Nevada.

Churchill County, NV

At the base of this cliff, archaeologists from the University of California, Berkeley excavated a rock shelter in 1958, naming it for Wagon Jack, a Western Shoshone man said to have camped nearby around 1900 and to have led communal jackrabbit drives in a neighboring valley. The dig revealed a succession of prehistoric cultures through their distinctive stone projectile points, including the Eastgate arrow points first described here. Bones of bighorn sheep, deer, and pronghorn and stone tools for grinding seeds and pinenuts rounded out the picture, and a radiocarbon date places the earliest occupation roughly 3,150 years ago.

Mineral County, NV

Land around Walker Lake was set aside for 'Indian purposes' in 1859, but only on March 19, 1874, did President Ulysses S. Grant sign the executive order formally creating the Walker River Indian Reservation. Indian agent Calvin Bateman reported that year that it was home to at least six hundred Northern Paiute, urging that the government's promise 'remain inviolate.' A century later, the reservation still spanned more than 300,000 acres and remained home to the Paiute community.

Douglas County, NV

In 1862, along the Carson branch of the emigrant trail, David and Harriet Walley developed the hot springs bubbling up along this fault line into a $100,000 spa complete with beds, a ballroom, and gardens. The mineral waters—ranging from 136 to 160 degrees—were promoted as a cure for rheumatism and other ailments, drawing visitors until the resort burned in 1935. A century later the same thermal source drew engineers testing for geothermal power.

Lincoln County, NV

This roadside memorial in the desert of Lincoln County honors Walter L. Ray, who gave his life in service to his country on January 5, 1967. That date falls during the height of American involvement in the Vietnam War, when service members from small Western communities were among those sent overseas. The lone marker keeps his name and sacrifice before travelers on the Nevada highway.

White Pine County, NV

These beehive-shaped stone ovens, built in the mid-1870s and unusually large at 27 feet across and 30 feet tall, turned cordwood into charcoal for the silver-lead smelters at nearby Ward. Each burn consumed some 35 cords over twelve days, and feeding a single oven took the timber from five or six acres—so voracious that the hills for miles around were stripped bare. When railroads brought cheaper coke, the charcoal industry faded away.

White Pine County, NV

In the silver-hungry decades after the Civil War, the Egan Range foothills briefly roared to life as Ward, a boomtown that swelled to about 1,500 souls between 1876 and 1882. A single chamber of the Ward mine gave up a million dollars in silver, yet the camp raised its first school in an abandoned house and never built a church, settling disputes instead by vigilante committee and hanging rope. Abandoned by the late 1880s, Ward saw brief revivals in 1906 and the 1960s as new methods reopened old ground.

Carson City, NV

Long before emigrant wagons crossed these valleys, this ground overlooked the homeland of the Washo people, whose language stands apart from that of their Shoshone and Paiute neighbors. For generations they wintered in the valleys and summered in the high Sierra around Lake Tahoe, gathering pine nuts in the autumn Goomsabyi ceremony that continues today. Their basketry—epitomized by the celebrated weaver Dat-So-La-Lee—became world famous.

Lyon County, NV

After the 1860 mining boom in the Aurora District, Jack Wright and Leonard Hamilton bridged the West Walker River and opened a stage station here, where wagons were repaired and horses shod. The stop soon grew into a trading center for surrounding ranches and farms. In 1863 Daniel Wellington bought out the founders and gave the place his name, and in 1875 wagonmaster Zadok Pierce built the Wellington Hotel, which over the years served as livery stable, freight station, general store, and post office.

Carson City, NV

In 1860, as the Aurora mining boom drew traffic through western Nevada, Jack Wright and Leonard Hamilton bridged the West Walker River and opened a stage station where wagons were repaired and horses shod. When Daniel Wellington bought them out in 1863, the crossroads became "Wellington's Station," and in 1875 wagonmaster Zadok Pierce built the nearby Wellington Hotel, which over the decades doubled as livery, freight depot, store, and post office.

Elko County, NV

Here the notorious Hastings Cutoff rejoined the main California Trail along the Humboldt. Promoted by Lansford Hastings as a shortcut, the route through the South Fork canyon proved a punishing detour. The Bartleson-Bidwell party first traversed it in 1841, and in 1846 the ill-fated Reed-Donner party followed Hastings's path — losing time that would trap them in the Sierra snows. By 1850 the dangerous cutoff was abandoned.

Lyon County, NV

Wilson Canyon and its mining district took their name from brothers David and "Uncle Billy" Wilson, who settled here in 1863 to work gold at Pine Grove and ranch in Mason Valley, eventually earning several million dollars. David, a California gold-rush veteran and Union Army soldier, became a prominent rancher before his death in 1915. Raised alongside the Wilson boys was a young Northern Paiute named Wovoka—who took the name Jack Wilson and in 1890 founded the Ghost Dance movement that swept the Great Plains with powerful spiritual and political force.

Clark County, NV

These words accompany the Winged Figures of the Republic, the towering bronze sentinels that guard the great dam on the Colorado River at the Nevada–Arizona line. The inscription honors the visionaries who conceived the project — turning "lonely lands" into fertile, powered country — and the workers whose labor made it real during the 1930s. The dam remains one of the defining engineering feats of its age.

Churchill County, NV

Thirteen miles north lies Wonder, a silver camp born in the 1906 rush that followed Nevada's Tonopah and Goldfield strikes. Between 1906 and 1915 it flared brightly — stores, saloons, a school, an ice plant, and even a swimming pool eased life in the desert while the Nevada Wonder Mining Company drew some $6 million in silver, gold, copper, and zinc from the ground. Wonder's most notable native was Eva Adams (1908–1991), a longtime aide to Senator Patrick McCarran who became the second woman to direct the U.S. Mint.