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Houses (Union Pacific Railroad Workers' Houses)

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Union Pacific Railroad Workers' Houses
1905 (1–16 Spring St.), 1924 (17–24 Spring St.)
  • (Photograph by Julie Nicoletta)

This row of wood-frame houses is the best collection of railroad workers' housing remaining in the state. The dwellings are ranged in an orderly sequence along the east side of Spring Street running north from the railroad, their regularity expressing the order that the railroad imposed on the town. The railroad owned the houses and rented them to workers until the 1950s, when it sold them. The dwellings follow either of two plans, both with front-facing gables, which alternate along the street. The first is a one-story house with a shed-roofed porch on square posts covering the facade. The second has two stories with a similar porch and a single double-hung window centered in the gable end. In their use of standardized plans, the railroad rows anticipated some of the design conventions of mass-produced postwar subdivisions such as Levittown.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Julie Nicoletta
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Data

What's Nearby

Caliente Depot

Citation

Julie Nicoletta, "Houses (Union Pacific Railroad Workers' Houses)", [Caliente, Nevada], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/NV-01-SO71.

Print Source

Buildings of Nevada, Julie Nicoletta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 251-252.

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