Reno's urban core begins where Virginia Street crosses the Truckee River. In the 1860s this was the site of the Truckee Meadows' first bridge and a toll road to Virginia City, known as the Sierra Valley Road (Virginia Street). Myron Lake operated the bridge and toll-road franchise, and...
This area west of downtown and north of the Truckee River is home to a variety of building styles and types. Divided by the Union Pacific Railroad, Ralston has a northern section historically characterized by industrial use and now given over to commercial and residential...
This area atop a bluff overlooking the Truckee River and parts of Reno has been the city's most elegant and most desirable neighborhood since the early twentieth century. The majority of structures here were erected from the 1890s to the 1940s. Many of the oldest buildings...
As the city has grown, ranches south of Reno have given way to subdivisions, the pace increasing drastically since the 1980s. With the opening of a new freeway parallel to South Virginia Street (old U.S. 395), business and industrial parks surrounded by asphalt parking lots have...
Founded by the Southern Pacific, Sparks is one of a few twentieth-century railroad towns in northwestern Nevada. The Southern Pacific acquired the Central Pacific in 1899 and began upgrading the rails, relocating more than half of the old railroad's track to reduce grades and make curves...
This valley between Reno and Carson City is a microcosm of the strikingly rugged and beautiful landscape of the high desert. The Sierra Nevada foothills to the west provide a forest environment. From there the terrain flattens to a broad valley that in wet years has a large lake fed by...
At its height in the nineteenth century, Virginia City, often called the “Queen of the Comstock,” was a large industrialized town that played an important role in western mining history. Its international population, both rich and poor, included at its peak thousands of Irish, over a...
South C Street turns into Gold Hill's Main Street, snaking down the mountainside in a pair of hairpin curves known as Greiner's Bend. During the nineteenth century Gold Hill housed thousands of laborers for local industry. There were commercial buildings and a few houses for the affluent,...
Silver City stands to the south of Devil's Gate, a pass through tall rock outcroppings that mark the boundary between Storey and Lyon counties. Founded in 1859 near the original sites of placer diggings in the 1850s, Silver City never became as prosperous as its neighbors in Storey...
One of the oldest communities in Nevada, Dayton was once known as Chinatown because of its large number of Chinese immigrants. In spite of their numerical importance, the Chinese tended to live in neighborhoods with humble wood buildings that were vulnerable to fire and the elements. Faced...
Adolph Sutro, a German immigrant, founded a town, which he named after himself, downriver from Dayton. He designed Sutro City as the home base for his tunnel project, which was to provide drainage and access to the Comstock mines three miles away. After overcoming political opposition, Sutro...
Nestled in Eagle Valley against the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Carson City encompasses nearly 147 square miles of land, ranging from the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe to the Virginia Mountains to the east. The development pattern is densest along U.S. 395 and U.S. 50. As early as 1858, six...
Mormons founded Genoa, one of Nevada's earliest Euro-American settlements, in 1851. A year earlier members of the church had opened a trading post here to serve the Emigrant Trail. By the mid-1850s a few hundred families, both Mormons and non-Mormons, had established farms in this fertile part...
Minden's quiet residential streets, large central square, and numerous well-designed buildings distinguish it from most northwestern Nevada towns. The Dangberg Land and Livestock Company founded Minden in 1904, naming it after a town in Westphalia, Germany. H. F. Dangberg, an immigrant from...
Lawrence Gilman, a settler in Genoa, founded Gardnerville in 1879, when he purchased land in the southern Carson Valley. He moved a house from Genoa and opened it as the Gardnerville Hotel. The construction of a road connecting the mining town of Bodie, California, and Carson City...
Yerington serves as the commercial and political center for the rural areas of Smith and Mason valleys. The Northern Paiute Indians first occupied the valleys, creating ditches to direct water from the East and West Walker rivers toward naturally occurring plants that sustained the tribe....
A small village near the West Walker River on Nevada 208, Wellington is a service center for Smith Valley. The area was settled in the 1860s and, like Mason Valley, became a rich agricultural region. Wellington also functioned as a stage stop for the mining town of Aurora. Despite recent...
Northern Nevada, one of the state's least populated regions, is home to national forests, wilderness areas, Native American reservations, and small, isolated towns with populations ranging from thirty to 25,000 residents. The remote northwest corner of the region, which contains the Black...
Initially part of the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, granted to the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe in 1859, what would become Wadsworth was soon overrun by Euro-American settlers and the Central Pacific Railroad, which illegally took the best land along the Truckee River from the tribe. At...
The area surrounding what is now Lovelock was settled by Euro-Americans in the early 1860s, when several individuals established ranches near the Humboldt River. The eponymous George Lovelock purchased hundreds of acres in 1866, as well as the stage stop located along the Emigrant Trail....
The development of Winnemucca and surrounding Humboldt County, unlike that of most other settlements in Nevada, was not tied exclusively to the boom-and-bust cycle of the mining industry. The Humboldt River Valley served much of the westward migration to California as a natural path...
The town of McDermitt straddles U.S. 95 just south of the Nevada-Oregon border. It began as a stage stop on the Idaho Trail between Boise and Winnemucca and later served as the community center for people living on vast sheep, cattle, and horse ranches. In the twentieth century the...
Located near the town of McDermitt, the 34,650-acre Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation is currently the home of about half of the 8,000-member Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe. The reservation occupies the site of a nineteenth-century U.S. Army fort. A thirteen-mile loop road,...
Paradise Valley is located between the Santa Rosa Mountains to the west and the Bloody Run Hills to the east. Its fertile, flat lands, surrounded by steep mountains, form one of the most beautiful valleys in Nevada. Settlers, including Euro-Americans, Germans, Italians, Hispanic...
Golconda was settled during the 1860s when mining commenced in the nearby mountains. The town's founders optimistically took its name from a city in Hyderabad, India, once famed for its wealth in diamonds. In 1862 Louis and Theophile Lay, who had helped settle Winnemucca, began construction...
Battle Mountain is located at the north end of Lander County in the Reese River Valley. The small settlement, established in the 1860s, served as a supply center for the Battle Mountain Mining District, then one of the most active in the state. It also became a railroad town upon the...
Unlike Battle Mountain and Winnemucca, which were towns in their own right before the arrival of the Central Pacific, Carlin was founded by the railroad as a division point. Set in a small valley, it was the first spot where the Emigrant Trail met the Humboldt River after a long detour. The...
Elko is one of Nevada's more complex towns. In the 1990s it became one of the fastest-growing places in one of the fastest-growing states in the country, with a population that doubled, to 25,000 people, within a decade. Its history, however, is similar to that of other towns settled along the...
The town of Lamoille, in the quiet and isolated Lamoille Valley at the foot of the Ruby Mountains, about sixteen miles southeast of Elko, has a pastoral atmosphere. Along its one main road are a general store, bar, and old school. Euro-Americans settled Lamoille around 1865 and established...
The small town of Owyhee, near the Nevada-Idaho border, is the center of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, established in 1877 for the Shoshone and Paiute. The reservation, a huge square of land, half in Nevada, half in Idaho, is situated in the beautiful Owyhee River Valley. Driving north...
