Nevada's Historic Buildings: A Cultural Legacy

Chapter 3. The Other Early Nevada

52 The Other Early Nevada 3 Nevada’s legendary gold and silver deposits sparked rushes and catapulted Nevada to statehood, but mining was not the only industry playing a role in the state’s early settlement. Ranchers, railroad workers, craftsmen, merchants, innkeepers, homemakers, and many others also helped develop the region and shape its culture. Their histories are part of the Nevada story, and the buildings they left behind represent attempts to survive in an unforgiving land. As early as the 1850s, Mormon settlers established farms in the area that would become Nevada, but they were not the first to cultivate crops in the region. Native Americans had engaged in agricultural activities in the Great Basin and in the northern reaches of the Mojave Desert for centuries . Indigenous people cultivated corn, squash, beans, and cotton in the Moapa and Virgin valleys of southern Nevada between roughly fifteen hundred and eight hundred years ago.1 Commerce has also long been important to those inhabiting the Great Basin and the Upper Mojave Desert. For centuries, Native Americans used trade routes leading east and west, and as previously noted, Spanish and Mexican traders and explorers traveled along the southern rim of the The Other Early Nevada 53 Great Basin on their way to California in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. British and American fur trappers crisscrossed the lands lying between the Rockies and the Sierra, competing for pelts in the 1820s and 1830s. And as thousands of forty-niners followed wagon trails across Nevada’s parched expanses, adventurous entrepreneurs established trading stations across the northern part of the Great Basin along the Humboldt River, along the Truckee River, and in the Carson, Eagle, and Washoe valleys on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada.2 Situated near water and benefiting from the gold and silver strikes of the 1850s and the 1860s, severalofthesetradingoutpostsdevelopedintofull-fledgedcommunities. Although these settlements were often less sophisticated than those established by Nevada’s miners, some of them survived the decline of boomtowns and the era of borassca, as times of mining depression were called, that began around 1880. The secret of survival during these economic hard times, as testified to by these communities, was adaptability and inventiveness. Some survived by catering to the needs of Nevada’s farmers and ranchers as regional trading centers, whereas others learned to exploit Nevada’s geographical position, lying between California and the East, by catering to the needs of transcontinental travelers, and by developing the rudiments of the state’s later highly vaunted tourism industry. In effect, Nevadans were practicing economic diversification as a means of surviving difficult times, long before the term became fashionable in finance and industry. golconda schoolhouse One of the settlements that survived the mining depression of the 1880s and 1890s was Golconda. The Golconda Mining District was organized in 1866 during the gold and silver excitement that gripped the state at the time. Two years later, the Central Pacific Railroad, wending its way through Nevada on its transcontinental route, passed through the area and established a stop that took its name from the nearby mining district. Golconda’s location, lying along the Humboldt River east of Winnemucca 54 Nevada’s Historic Buildings and west of Elko, in northern Nevada’s high sagebrush terrain, made it an obvious mercantile center for local mines and ranches. Although area mines repeatedly sprang into existence, the Golconda Mining District was not as profitable as others, and railroading and ranching remained the mainstays of the community. Local hot springs also contributed to the town’s economy, giving rise to its reputation as a health spa.3 Despite its economic diversity, Golconda remained a modest-sized community. From 1870 to 1900, censuses recorded a population sputtering between eighty and just under five hundred residents. Nevertheless , its economic core was more stable than that of many contemporary towns dependent entirely on mining. In 1888, Golconda could justify conThe nineteenth-century Golconda Schoolhouse is an impressive architectural statement. The Other Early Nevada 55 structing a substantial schoolhouse twenty years after the transcontinental railroad had reached the area, and a decade before the town would realize some of its more notable mining successes. The clapboard-sided one-story Golconda Schoolhouse, designed by J. L. Donnel, represents a vernacular attempt at sophisticated monumental architecture. A striking belfry, clothed in fish-scale shingles and capped with a hipped roof peak, raises the level of the building, allowing...