612 Quincy Street, Reno: A Bricklayer's House and Nevada's Divorce Law

No photograph heads this article yet. The house is still standing on a public street in Reno, which means the best picture of it has not been taken rather than lost — an unusual and rather cheerful position for a building to be in, and one worth acting on.

Start in the basement, because that is where anybody who has been inside this house starts.

It is small, it is cold, and everything in it has been painted white. Walls, joists, the lot. People do that to old cellars when they cannot make them dry and cannot make them bigger, so they make them bright instead. It never quite works.

The county record explains the feeling exactly. The basement at 612 Quincy Street is carded as a DUGOUT, three hundred and ten square feet, unfinished, beneath a house of thirteen hundred and fifty. You go down the stairs and the room simply ends — a wall, floor joists overhead, and the rest of the house sitting on bare ground beyond it. Somebody dug out what they needed and stopped.

The house above it is two storeys of red brick at the front, the upper floor tucked up under a steep gable. Three levels in all, counting the one you are standing in.

The gable end is half-timbered — dark timbers on white panels, with a small lattice vent at the apex — and it flares outward above the brickwork in a bellcast skirt. Both front windows sit under segmental arches turned in brick, the lower one glazed in diamond lattice. The entrance is a deep recess behind a round-headed arch tall enough to walk into without ducking. And at every corner, and around every opening, the brick is laid up in blocks that stand proud of the wall, so the front of the house carries rusticated quoins the way a stone building would. Four bedrooms, one bathroom, one fireplace.

The county dates it to 1905.

And for thirty-four years at least, it belonged to a bricklayer from Lincolnshire who helped change the law that made Reno famous.

The Mesdames Ward

The first trace of this address anywhere in print is a tea party.

February 1913, in the society column: The Mesdames Ward will be the hostess Tuesday afternoon to the Maccabee Circle at their home, 612 Quincy street.

Read that plural. Mesdames. Two or more adult Ward women keeping house together at this address in 1913, and keeping it well enough to host a fraternal society in the front room.

The Maccabees were a benefit society — the Ladies of the Maccabees, a working-class insurance organisation in the days before anybody had insurance. You paid dues and the order paid out when you were widowed or sick. Their Reno review met in members' parlours, and this parlour was one of them for years.

By May 1919 the column is more precise. Mrs. A. Ward will be hostess Tuesday afternoon, May 13, at her home, 612 Quincy street, with A. Ward and Mrs. W. Ward as assistant hostess. The delegates had just come back from the convention in Oakland and gave their reports.

So: Mrs. A. Ward is the householder, and Mrs. W. Ward is in the house too. A for Alfred, W for William. Two generations, or two brothers' families, under the one roof. That is how working households were organised, and it is the first thing the record tells you about these people.

A One-Ton Ford in the Yard

In the last week of January 1920 the same address ran a classified advertisement every day for a week:

“FOR SALE — Ford one-ton truck with body complete; extra tire and tubes; good as new; solid rear tires; price $600. 612 Quincy ave. Phone 504.”

Two things in six lines.

The first is that the paper called it Quincy ave. That is how the street was styled then, and it is the kind of detail that decides whether you find a house in an archive or walk straight past it.

The second is the truck itself. A one-ton Ford with a body and solid rear tyres, parked at a house on a residential street in 1920, is not transport. It is plant. Somebody at this address was hauling material for a living, and had enough work — or enough trouble — to be turning over equipment.

Six hundred dollars, in 1920, for a truck described as good as new.

Alfred Ward of Boston, Lincolnshire

He died on a Monday afternoon in March 1959, in a Reno hospital, after a brief illness. He was seventy-seven.

The evening paper ran his obituary the next day with his photograph above it — a heavy, cheerful, bespectacled face in a dark suit — under the caption Dies in Reno: Alfred Ward, above, civic leader and builder. The headline was “Alfred Ward, Reno Building Leader Dies.”

He was born on the fifteenth of April 1881 at Boston, in Lincolnshire, England — a fen town on the Wash, flat country, a church tower you can see for twenty miles. He came to the United States in 1907 and settled in Reno, and with his two brothers, John and William, he ran the William Ward building contracting firm.

And then the sentence that explains the house:

“Mr. Ward recently was honored as the oldest member of the Reno Bricklayers Local, having joined in his teens.”

A bricklayer. In a brick house.

He joined the union as a boy — in England, presumably, since he did not reach America until he was twenty-six — and he was still the oldest man on the local register half a century later. Everything about 612 Quincy Street follows from that one fact: the brick on masonry, the round arch turned over the porch, the segmental arches over the windows, the rusticated quoins running up every corner, the decision to live in a brick house on a street of frame cottages.

What the Wards Built

The firm was not a jobbing outfit. The obituary lists what it put up, under a sub-head that reads simply BUILT THEATERS:

• The Majestic Theater, Reno.
• The Granada Theater — the old Rialto.
• The agriculture and science buildings at the University of Nevada.
• Orvis Ring School and McKinley Park School.
• The chapel at St. Mary's convent.

Two picture palaces, two schools, a university's working buildings, and a convent chapel. That is a firm that built the public face of a city.

Which makes the rest of the record slightly comic. In the building-permit column of September 1937 the William Ward Co. appears twice — remodelling for a Mr. Gallo at 407 Washington Street, one hundred dollars; remodelling for Mrs. Lillie Gillson at 503 West Fourth Street, one hundred dollars. On the same page that day are Tognoni, Byars, Palsgrove and Bony, Wine and Williams, Dave Gardella. Ward is listed among them in the ordinary working rank of Reno builders, taking hundred-dollar jobs.

That is what a contracting business actually looks like across a lifetime. The theatre is the thing people remember. The hundred-dollar remodel is the thing that pays for Tuesday.

And in April 1947, in the same column, there is this:

“William Ward Co., 612 Quincy St., insulation, $150.”

The firm, pulling a permit on its own house. Thirty-four years after the Mesdames Ward poured tea for the Maccabees in the front room, somebody from the family was still there, and still the contractor of record on the building.

The Divorce Bill

Here is where a modest house on an ordinary street turns out to be attached to the thing Reno is known for in the rest of the world.

From the obituary, verbatim:

“Long interested in civic and business affairs, Mr. Ward was instrumental in the formation of the Business Men's Association, a well known early business men's civic group. In 1915 during a bad depression in Reno, Ward helped promote the divorce bill which provided for six weeks residence in the state instead of a year. He also supported the horse racing bill which legalized that activity in Nevada and was past president of the racing association which was formed subsequently in Reno.”

A bricklayer from the Lincolnshire fens, lobbying the legislature to shorten the residency requirement for divorce.

Now the honest part, because that paragraph is wrong in a way that matters.

The six-week residency is 1931, not 1915. Nevada's requirement went to six weeks in the legislature of that year, and that is the law that produced the divorce trade everyone remembers — the ranches, the six-week guests, the Riverside Hotel, the whole industry. What happened in 1915 was different: the legislature repealed the one-year residency it had imposed in 1913, which had nearly killed the business, and restored the shorter term.

So a reporter in 1959, writing up a seventy-seven-year-old man's life, has compressed sixteen years of statute into a single sentence and attached the famous number to the earlier fight.

What can be said is this, and it is enough: Alfred Ward was part of the Reno business group that campaigned to shorten the divorce residency, in the fight of 1915. The town was in a bad depression, the one-year law had choked off the trade, and the men who stood to lose were the men who built and sold things — which is to say, men like a contractor with a truck and three brothers and a payroll.

He also pushed the bill that legalised horse racing in Nevada, and afterwards ran the racing association.

Divorce and horse racing. A bricklayer's two legislative causes, and between them a fair sketch of how twentieth-century Nevada decided to make a living.

Old Age Aid

And then the part that complicates him, which is the part worth keeping.

“Among other foresighted achievements was his sponsorship of the old age assistance plan in Nevada. He toured the state in support of the measure along with the late Judge Harry Dunseath and appeared before the legislature several times on its behalf. At an early date he helped the state to become one of the first in the U.S. to provide assistance for the aged.”

He toured Nevada. With a judge. Repeatedly. For a state pension.

Try to hold the two things at once. The same man lobbied to make it quicker to get divorced in Nevada and to make it possible to grow old in Nevada without destitution, and he seems to have regarded both as the same kind of work: things the state could do that would make life here bearable.

It is also, if you think about what he did for a living, entirely consistent. A man who joined the bricklayers' union in his teens and was still its oldest member at seventy-seven has spent his whole life inside an organisation whose entire purpose is that nobody should be ruined by getting hurt or getting old. The Maccabee ladies in his front parlour in 1913 were doing the same thing by subscription. He simply went and asked the legislature to do it at scale.

The Gable

So who put the half-timbering on the front?

The county gives the house two dates. The build year is 1905. The weighted average year — the assessor's way of accounting for later work — is 1920. A gap like that means somebody spent real money on the building in the fifteen years between.

And mock-Tudor framing in a gable end is a date in itself. It is not a 1905 taste. It belongs to the late teens and the twenties, when every builder's catalogue in America had a half-timbered gable in it, and when a plain brick box could be given a face for the price of some boards and a weekend.

Put the three things side by side. A house remodelled around 1920. A one-ton truck in the yard in January 1920. A family of building contractors living in it.

The obvious answer is that Alfred Ward or his brothers did the work themselves, on their own house, in the fashion of the moment, with their own crew and their own brick.

And it is not proved. No permit between 1915 and 1925 naming this address has been found, and city permit columns of that period are patchy. So it stays what it is: the most economical explanation, resting on three facts that all point the same way, and not a documented one.

There is one other thing the record cannot reconcile, and it should be said plainly. Ward did not reach America until 1907, and the county dates the house to 1905. Either the assessor's date is approximate — which such dates very often are — or the Wards bought a house that was already standing. Nobody should write that Alfred Ward built 612 Quincy Street. What can be written is that a bricklayer lived in it for most of his adult life, and that it looks like it.

The Second House

In 1930 a second dwelling went up on the same lot.

It is smaller and plainer: one storey, two bedrooms, one bathroom, ten hundred and fifty square feet, a wall furnace, no basement at all. The main house is carded fair-to-average; this one is carded low-to-fair.

But look at the walls. The assessor lists them as plywood on frame — and then, as a second wall type, brick veneer on frame.

Somebody faced the new building in brick to match the old one.

That is the detail that makes it personal. A contractor throwing up a quick rental at the start of the Depression does not pay for brick veneer; he builds in frame and lets it look like what it is. Facing it to match means somebody intended the two buildings to be read together, as one place. Which usually means family — a grown son, a married daughter, a widowed parent, put on the back of the lot in a house that matches the front.

No permit for it has been found, so who it was built for is unknown.

What Nobody Knows Yet

Three things about this house remain open, and it is worth listing them because somebody local could close any of them.

Who Leete was. The legal description puts the lot in the Leete Syndicate Addition, Block 12, Lots 4 and 5 and the north half of Lot 3. The syndicate was real and it was in court by 1908, suing a neighbouring landholder over water — which is exactly what a group does when it is assembling ranch ground to subdivide, because ditch rights have to be settled before lots will sell. But who Leete was, when the plat was recorded, and who else was in the syndicate are all unanswered. The newspapers will not do it; the recorded plat will, and it is a map in a county drawer.

What happened in the first eight years. If the house went up in 1905, its first appearance in print is 1913. Eight silent years, which for a house is normal and for a researcher is maddening.

Where the Wards went. In March 1959, two days after Alfred died, a deed column records Alfred Ward, John Ward, William Ward Co., Letty Ward, William Ward, Jr., and Dorothy W. Ginocchio conveying property at Moana Lane and South Virginia Street. Three weeks later the William Ward Co. sold a lot in the Hillbrae subdivision. The estate was settling, and the family had holdings well beyond this street — including, it turns out, ground in the same tract as a trailer park four miles south that I have written about elsewhere.

And note the last name on that deed. Dorothy W. Ginocchio. A Ward daughter married into one of the Italian families of Reno, which is the ordinary and unremarkable way that an English bricklayer's household becomes a Nevada one inside two generations.

A Tradesman's Calling Card

Most old houses that get written about are somebody's statement. A mine owner's mansion, a banker's pile, a ranch house built to be seen from the road. They are interesting because of the money.

612 Quincy Street is the other kind, and there are far more of them. It is a working man's house that happens to be very well built, because the working man laid brick for a living and was not going to live in a frame box when he could do better. The gable is showing off a little. The arch over the porch is showing off a lot. The quoins are showing off most of all, because every one of those projecting blocks is a decision made at the wall, by hand, by somebody who wanted the front of his house to argue with the cottages either side of it. None of it cost very much, because the labour was already in the family.

And the man inside it turns out to have had a hand in two of the laws that decided what Nevada would become, and a third that decided how it would treat its old people.

None of that is on a plaque. There is no marker on this street. The house is not on any register, and nothing about it is protected. It survives for the ordinary reason — somebody keeps buying it and keeps it standing — and in March 2025 it changed hands again, to owners who are working on it now.

If you go and look at it, the things to see are the round arch over the entrance, the segmental arches turned over both front windows, and the rusticated quoins running up every corner. That is a tradesman's signature, and it is the only one he left.

And if you ever get into the basement, you will find it painted white. Everyone paints them white.

Resources & Further Reading

The building record — the 1905 and 1930 construction dates, the brick-on-masonry walls, the 310 square foot dugout basement, the room counts, the 1920 weighted average year, the brick veneer on the second building, and the legal description in the Leete Syndicate Addition — is from the Washoe County Assessor's property record for APN 008-197-11, read in November 2026. The earliest located mention of the address is a society note in the Nevada State Journal of 9 February 1913, page 10; the fuller Maccabee note naming Mrs. A. Ward and Mrs. W. Ward is in the same paper of 4 May 1919, page 9. The one-ton Ford advertisement ran daily in the Nevada State Journal from at least 23 to 29 January 1920, read at the issue of 29 January, page 7. The William Ward Co. appears twice in the city building-permit column of the Reno Gazette-Journal of 14 September 1937, page 16, and again at its own address in the Nevada State Journal of 22 April 1947, page 3. Alfred Ward's obituary, with his photograph, is in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 17 March 1959, page 11, under the headline “Alfred Ward, Reno Building Leader Dies”; it is the source for his birth at Boston, Lincolnshire on 15 April 1881, his arrival in 1907, the Bricklayers Local, the buildings the firm put up, the divorce and horse racing bills, the Business Men's Association, and the old age assistance campaign with Judge Harry Dunseath. Further notices ran in both Reno papers on 17, 18 and 19 March 1959. The family's property conveyances appear in the deed columns of the Nevada State Journal of 19 March 1959, page 3, and 8 April 1959, page 3. The Leete Syndicate's 1908 water suit is reported in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 2 April 1908, page 1, under the headline “Leete Syndicate Is In The Courts.”

On the point where the obituary and the statute book disagree: Nevada reduced the divorce residency requirement to six weeks in 1931. The one-year requirement enacted in 1913 was repealed in 1915, restoring the shorter term. The 1959 obituary attaches the 1931 figure to the 1915 fight, which is a reporter's compression rather than a record of what Ward actually campaigned for.

A note on storeys, because the paperwork and the street disagree. The assessor cards the main house as one and a half storeys, which is an assessment convention for an upper floor finished under a pitched roof. Standing in front of it, the building reads as two full storeys of brick, with the dugout basement under part of the ground floor making three levels in all.

• Washoe County Assessor — the property record and building cards for APN 008-197-11, which are the only documentary evidence of this house's age and construction.
• Nevada Humanities — the Online Nevada Encyclopedia, for the legislative history of the residency requirement and the development of the divorce trade.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society — walking tours and research on the neighbourhoods east of the river, and the best route to anybody who remembers the Majestic and the Granada.
• 775 Gentry Way: The Stone House Inside Reno's Travelier Trailer Park — the Hillbrae tract where the William Ward Co. was still selling lots in 1959, four miles south of Quincy Street.
• Bella Vista Ranch, Reno: A Donner Camp, Twelve Buildings, and an $85 Million Sale — what happens to a building of this age when nobody is living in it and the ground underneath becomes worth something.
• The Italian Ranches of the Truckee Meadows — the Reno the Ginocchios came from, and the families an English bricklayer's daughter married into.

A note on what is not here: no photograph of 612 Quincy Street or of Alfred Ward is published with this article. His obituary portrait is in a newspaper archive and cannot be reproduced commercially; the house is standing, on a public street, and the right picture of it is one taken by somebody who walks up and takes it. Where the record is silent — on who built the gable, on who the second house was for, on who Leete was — this article says so rather than guessing.