The House with the Turret: 829 North Center Street and the Atchesons

The trees on North Center Street were enormous. I had the upstairs, and when the balcony door at the front was open the air came straight through the hallway and out the kitchen window at the back, over the low roof. I can still feel it.

That was a hundred-year-old house two doors up from the one I had lived in before. I rented both of them from a lawyer named Fred Atcheson, whose family had owned the best house on that block for seventy years, and who told me he had been born in it.

Neither house exists. The one I lived in first was pulled down in June of 2020. The second came down in November of 2019. A five-storey business building opened on that ground in August of 2025, and if you stand in front of it today there is nothing to tell you that six Queen Anne houses stood in a row there — the last intact block of nineteenth-century homes in Reno.

This is the history of one of them, and of the family that kept it, written partly out of the record and partly out of my own memory, because for the last part of the story the record is thin and I was there.

The Lot Cost Four Hundred and Fifty Dollars

In 1889 Alvaro Evans sold a plot at the foot of the new university — bounded by Virginia and North Center between Eighth and Ninth — to a Reno banker named A. G. Fletcher, who divided it into fourteen lots. Fletcher had come out from Maine in 1875, built flumes to float wood down to the railroad that served the Comstock, tried sheep, and ended up in banking, which tells you most of what you need to know about how fortunes were made here.

He began selling the lots in the 1890s, and the houses that went up on the west side of Center Street were all Queen Anne, which was then a new and fashionable thing.

In August of 1895 a grocer named Lewis D. Folsom bought the lot in the middle of the 800 block for four hundred and fifty dollars and built the best house on the street.

It was two storeys and eight rooms. It had spindle trim and a turret roofed in fish-scale shingles. It had gas and electric light in every room, a modern range, and a shelf dumbwaiter running down to the cellar. The foundation stone came out of Robert L. Fulton's quarry north of town. The architect and builder was George E. Holesworth, who in that same year was appointed supervising architect of the University of Nevada — which is to say the man building the campus at the top of the street also built the house at the bottom of it.

At the end of December 1895 the Reno morning paper wrote that in point of architectural beauty and modern convenience it was doubtful whether there was another residence in town that could equal it.

Folsom himself had come from Maine to Nevada in 1874, kept a store at Gold Hill, married Mary Keville at Dayton, and come down to Reno about ten years later, where he and a partner bought out Jerry Schooling's grocery. He died in 1918. Mary stayed in the house for years after him.

The Man from Belfast

The family that would hold the house for the next seventy years was not in Reno yet, and was not from anywhere near it.

James C. Atcheson was born in Belfast in 1866. He came to the United States in 1882, at sixteen, and came west a year later to take a job on his uncle Henry Williams' ranch at Sweetwater, out in the high country on the Nevada–California line. He stayed in the cattle business for thirty-six years.

On the sixteenth of April, 1886, he married Katie Williams, and her story is the harder one. She was born in Michigan in 1871 and came west as a child with her parents, the Jollys, who settled at Virginia City. Her mother died soon after they arrived. The girl was taken in and raised by the Williams family at Sweetwater — the same ranching family her husband had come from Ireland to work for.

They settled on a Sweetwater ranch and every one of their six children was born there. In 1919 James sold out his cattle interests and the family moved to Reno, to 111 Elm Street, where he died of a heart attack in September of 1933 with ten grandchildren living.

And then, around 1943, Katie Atcheson bought the house with the turret.

She never lived in it. She died at 111 Elm Street in January of 1947, leaving an estate valued just under forty thousand dollars, with her son Henry as one of the executors. The house on Center Street was property — a thing a widow of a cattleman bought and held, and that came down through the estate to her children.

A girl orphaned on the Comstock and raised by strangers at Sweetwater bought the finest house on the finest residential block in Reno, and then stayed where she was.

The Forest Ranger and the Engineer

Katie's son Henry W. Atcheson was born at Sweetwater in 1887, went to work for the United States Forest Service in 1909, and stayed with it until he retired in 1945. He lived in Gardnerville for forty years and died in January 1952 as district ranger for the Bridgeport area. He is buried in the Atcheson family plot at Mountain View Cemetery in Reno.

Henry's son Merle H. Atcheson is the one who moved into the house, and he is worth a section of his own.

Born at Gardnerville in 1912, he took an electrical engineering degree at the University of Nevada and went to work for Sierra Pacific Power in 1935 as a meter tester. He worked up through electrician, assistant engineer, engineer in charge, vice president in charge of engineering in 1960, and senior vice president in 1965, and retired in June of 1974. He was Engineer of the Year in 1971. When he died in February 1976 the paper put him on the front page and a former company president called him an exceptionally fine engineer whose work was still evident in the power company.

Two things about him deserve to be better known than they are.

The first is serious. It was Atcheson's idea to spread Nevada's power plants across several locations rather than concentrate them in one, so that a fire or a catastrophe could not take out the state's electricity at a stroke. After the Donner Summit fire in the early 1960s he pushed for generating capacity on the Nevada side of the Sierra so Nevada would not be hostage to a blackout on the California side. Everyone who has had the lights stay on in a Nevada emergency since owes that man something.

The second is wonderful. In the years when KOH was the only radio station in Reno, Merle Atcheson was in the power company's engineering department. The announcer would put a question to the audience on the air — how many of you favour this — and ask the listeners who agreed to switch on a light. Atcheson, watching the voltage and the generating output, would read the answer off his instruments. Then the announcer would call for the other side, and he would read that too.

That is how public opinion polling started in Reno: a man in a power plant watching the load.

The Pianist Who Grew Up Two Doors Down

In July of 1937 Merle Atcheson married Mary Adeline Thompson at her parents' house on Riverside Drive. It was a very quiet wedding: only relatives and a few intimate friends, no music, no attendants, the bride in blue sheer crepe, a wedding breakfast, and then off by motor to an unknown destination.

Her father read the service himself. He was Dean Reuben C. Thompson, who taught at the University of Nevada from 1908 to 1948, founded its philosophy department, taught Greek, and became dean of men. The Thompson Building on campus was named for him in 1959.

And here is the detail that makes the whole block fold in on itself.

Around 1917, Dean Thompson was living at 821 North Center Street — two doors south of the house with the turret.

So Mary Thompson spent part of her childhood on that block, a few steps from a Queen Anne she had no reason to think about. She grew up, took a degree at the university, taught at Hawthorne, married an engineer, and moved into that very house. She was a pianist, and she played in it for decades. In 1977 the paper has her at a devotional service at the Reno Unity Center — which was the Mary Sherman House at 847 North Center, two doors the other way.

She lived her whole life inside one block of Reno, and every house on it is now gone.

Fred

Merle and Mary had four children. Jim became a doctor and was elected student body president at the university in 1963. Steve became a doctor too, and appears in the paper in 1960 as a youth of 829 North Center in a car that skidded broadside, which is how we know the family was in the house by then. Sallie became a real estate agent in Anchorage and was, like her mother, an accomplished pianist.

And Fred Hill Atcheson went to the McGeorge School of Law, was admitted to the Nevada bar in 1976 — the year his father died — and came home.

Fred told me he was born in that house. I have no document for it and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but the family was there, and I believe him.

He practised law in Reno out of an office in a house across from the university, and he divided the big Queen Anne into apartments and rented them to students. In 1999 he bought the house next door at 839 North Center — the Berry House — and did the same thing, and by 2005 it had six mailboxes on the front.

That house had its own history he had just become the custodian of. A judge's widow and four daughters lived there around 1900, two of them graduating from the university that year. A quartz miner's family after that. Then a Norwegian clerk named Nelson, then a professor of military science. And then from 1942 to 1998 — fifty-six years — it was the home of Bill Berry, a Nevada State Journal reporter who became the great historian of skiing in the Sierra.

What It Was Like to Live There

From 2008 to 2011 I lived on this block, and this is the part of the record that does not exist anywhere else, so I am going to set it down carefully.

One honest caveat first. Fifteen years on, the house numbers defeat me. I knew the first one as 821 North Center — the spindled one — and the second as the one two doors up. The block ran 815, 821, 829, 839, 847, and anyone who has lived in a row of near-identical Queen Annes with the same landlord will know how little the numbers stick. What I remember without any doubt at all is the houses themselves.

It was enormous, and it had been added to in sections over a century, so that moving through it you could feel where one era stopped and another started. The tower was on the east side, facing the street, with a room in it. There was a balcony. And in the middle of the house there was a courtyard — a façade and a garden, with units built at the back of the lot.

Fred lived downstairs. He had refinished the basement himself. I had the upstairs. His daughter, his granddaughter and his son lived in the units at the back. It was not a house that had been carved up by a landlord and left; it was a house with a family still in it, renting out the parts they were not using, which is a very different thing and you could feel the difference.

Two years later, after I finished the MBA programme at the university, I called him and he had a unit two houses to the north. His daughter had sanded the floors. There was a unit carved out downstairs and I had the whole upstairs: two large rooms, a kitchen that had obviously been a bedroom in some earlier life of the house, a small bathroom, and a balcony on the front.

The trees out there were huge. When the balcony door was open the wind came in off the street, down the hallway, and out the kitchen window over the low roof at the back, and the whole floor breathed. I have lived in a lot of places since and I have never had that again.

Fred was a corky guy and we got on well. He wrote me a recommendation letter for law school. He lent me his road bike — a red Campbell with Campagnolo components — to ride to work at the Stone House when I was in college.

I want to be plain about why that matters here and not just to me. There is no interior description of either of those houses in any archive. There are exterior photographs taken from the sidewalk by preservationists, and a resource assessment form, and a realtor's square footage. Nobody wrote down that there was a garden in the middle of one of them, or that an upstairs kitchen in another had plainly been a bedroom once, or how the air moved. The people who knew are the people who lived there, and the houses came down before anyone thought to ask them.

How It Ended

In December of 2014 the Board of Regents approved a university master plan that created a Campus Gateway Precinct between the south end of campus and the freeway. On the map, the block I had lived on was an empty rectangle.

What followed took six years and is worth stating in order, because the story is usually told as though the houses simply fell down.

In March 2016 the university's executive director of external relations said, "We are not looking to demolish those buildings." In April 2016 the Reno City Council adopted the Gateway designation, and the mayor said, "I want everybody to know we're not tearing down homes and the University is committed to saving those homes." In July 2016 the president told the Historic Resources Commission that relocating the six Center Street houses was the only option for growth: six relocated houses would hold twenty-nine faculty offices; a five-storey business building would hold a hundred and eighty.

In November 2017 the Regents' finance committee pre-approved relinquishing twelve properties. In April 2018 the university issued a request for proposals to give the houses away to anyone who would move them, with a six-week window and a requirement that bidders already own the land to move them to. Seven bids came in; two were judged fully responsive. A proposal to move the houses to Evans Park as a historic park was rejected. Ten houses were awarded to a Burning Man–affiliated developer that planned to take them to vacant land north of Gerlach.

On 1 November 2018 that developer withdrew, and ten houses had nowhere to go.

Later that month the president said demolition would be "a last resort." Preservationists circulated a petition and an open letter. The university declined a public meeting with the Historic Resources Commission in December and offered dates in January.

On 7 June 2019 the Regents approved the designs and the money.

Four houses were saved by private buyers who moved them: the Humphrey House on the seventh of April 2019 to Arlington and St. Lawrence; the Mack House on the twenty-first of June 2020 to Plumas Street; the Armstrong House to West Taylor Street; the Riegg House to Lander Street on the thirtieth of August 2020.

The rest came down. 839 North Center, the Berry house, was demolished in November 2019, and the Mary Sherman House went the same month. 829 North Center — the Folsom house, the turret — was demolished in June 2020. Between them they took both of the apartments I had lived in.

The Gateway Parking Complex, seven storeys and 814 spaces, opened on 20 January 2023. The John Tulloch Business Building — five storeys, 128,000 square feet, a 300-seat auditorium, a trading lab with live market data — opened on 26 August 2025, on time and on budget. A $137 million Life Sciences Building breaks ground across the street this autumn.

I want to be fair about this, because the easy version of this article is not the true one. The university needed the space, the buildings are good buildings, and the students in them will get something out of them that nobody was getting out of six student rentals. The people who made these decisions were not vandals.

But the record shows four years of public assurances that the houses would be saved, followed by a process that gave them away on a six-week deadline to a bidder who could not perform, followed by demolition. And the thing that was lost was not six old buildings. It was the last unbroken row of nineteenth-century houses in this city, and it is not coming back, and the ground it stood on is now a parking garage and a business school.

At a Glance: 829 North Center Street

• What: the Folsom House, later the Atcheson House — a two-storey, eight-room Queen Anne with a fish-scale turret, the best house on Reno's last intact block of nineteenth-century homes.
• Built: 1895 for grocer Lewis D. Folsom, who paid $450 for the lot in August of that year. Architect and builder George E. Holesworth, appointed the University of Nevada's supervising architect the same year. Foundation stone from Robert L. Fulton's quarry north of town.
• The street: North Center Street was called University Avenue for part of its history; the 1949 Sanborn still labels it that way.
• The block: part of fourteen lots subdivided by banker A. G. Fletcher in 1889 out of land bought from Alvaro Evans.
• The family, four generations: James C. Atcheson (b. Belfast 1866, to the U.S. 1882, Sweetwater cattleman, d. 1933) and Katie Williams Atcheson (b. Michigan 1871, orphaned at Virginia City, raised by the Williams family at Sweetwater, d. 1947) → Henry W. Atcheson (b. Sweetwater 1887, U.S. Forest Service 1909–1945, district ranger, d. 1952) → Merle H. Atcheson (b. Gardnerville 1912, Sierra Pacific Power 1935–1974, senior vice president, d. 1976) and Mary Adeline Thompson, pianist → Fred Hill Atcheson, attorney.
• Bought: about 1943, by Katie Atcheson — who never lived in it. She died at 111 Elm Street in 1947 leaving an estate just under $40,000.
• Mary Thompson's father was Dean Reuben C. Thompson (UNR 1908–1948, founded the philosophy department, dean of men; the Thompson Building named for him in 1959), who lived at 821 N. Center around 1917 — two doors from the house his daughter would later live in.
• Merle Atcheson's two legacies: he pushed to spread Nevada's generating plants across multiple sites so one fire could not black out the state; and in the days when KOH was Reno's only radio station, he ran the city's first public opinion polls by reading the voltage as listeners switched their lights on.
• Fred Atcheson divided 829 into student apartments and in 1999 bought 839 N. Center, the Berry House, and did the same. 839 had been home to Bill Berry, Nevada State Journal reporter and Sierra ski historian, from 1942 to 1998.
• Sold: 839 to the university in December 2015; 829 in early 2016.
• Demolished: 839 in November 2019. 829 in June 2020.
• What stands there now: the Gateway Parking Complex (seven storeys, 814 spaces, opened 20 January 2023) and the John Tulloch Business Building (five storeys, 128,000 sq ft, opened 26 August 2025).
• Saved and moved: four of the twelve — the Humphrey House (April 2019), the Mack House (June 2020), the Armstrong/de Longchamps House and the Riegg House (August 2020).

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I see the house anywhere?

Only in photographs. The best known is a view down Center Street from the university gates printed in the 1913 Artemisia yearbook, with the turret visible on the right. There is also a photograph from about 1900 showing the Folsoms on the porch, which belonged to Fred Atcheson. The house itself was demolished in June 2020.

Were any of the houses saved?

Four of twelve, all by private buyers who paid to move them: the Garat/Humphrey House to Arlington and St. Lawrence in April 2019; the Mack House from 829 Lake Street to 2520 Plumas Street in June 2020; the Armstrong House, where the poet Joanne de Longchamps lived, to West Taylor Street in 2020; and the Riegg House to Lander Street in August 2020. They are still standing and you can go and look at them.

Why wasn't the row protected?

One house on the block — the Mary Sherman House at 847 — was on the Nevada State Register from 1998 and the City of Reno register from 1999, and it was demolished anyway in November 2019. Several others were professionally assessed as eligible for the National Register, but eligibility is not listing, and listing a property does not stop a public owner from removing it. The protection people assume exists mostly does not.

Who was Fred Atcheson?

A Reno attorney, admitted to the Nevada bar in 1976 out of the McGeorge School of Law, and the fourth generation of his family to hold 829 North Center. He kept both houses as student apartments while living in one of them with three generations of his family around him, and sold them to the university in 2015 and 2016.

What was "the Gateway"?

The precinct created in the university's December 2014 master plan, covering the ground between the south end of campus and Interstate 80. Twelve houses stood in it. The freeway had already cut this neighbourhood off from the rest of the old city in the 1960s and 1970s; the Gateway plan finished the job.

What happened to the Bibo Coffee building?

945 Record Street — a former railroad maintenance building, which stood where the 1949 and 1955 Sanborn maps show only a fan of storage sidings — was the Record Street Café, then Record Street Brewing, then Bibo Coffee from February 2010. It closed on 10 October 2019, with customers signing the blank walls, and was bulldozed for student housing.

Conclusion

A hundred and twenty-five years is not a long time, and you can get it into one block.

A banker from Maine cut fourteen lots out of a rancher's field. A grocer from Maine paid four hundred and fifty dollars for the middle one and hired the man who was building the university to build him a house with a turret. A boy from Belfast got off a boat in 1882 and went to work on his uncle's cattle ranch, and married a girl whose mother had died at Virginia City and who had been raised by that same family. Their money bought the grocer's house forty-eight years later. Their grandson spent his working life keeping the lights on in Nevada and invented, more or less by accident, the opinion poll in this town. His wife was a pianist who had grown up two doors away. Their son was a lawyer who was born in the house and rented its rooms to students until he was in his sixties.

And then it was a rectangle on a master plan, and then it was gone, and now it is a very good business building with a trading lab in it.

I do not think anybody did anything wrong, exactly. That is the part I keep turning over. Every step was defensible. The university needed room and said so. The houses were rentals in poor repair. Somebody offered to move them and could not deliver. The Regents voted in public. And at the end of a perfectly lawful process the last intact row of nineteenth-century houses in Reno was gone, and the only people who could tell you what the inside of them was like were a few former tenants and a family that had moved out.

What I have is this. A room in a tower on the east side. A garden in the middle of a house, with the family living around it. A kitchen that used to be a bedroom. Large trees. And a hallway on a second floor two doors up where, if you opened the balcony door at the front, the air went all the way through and out over the low roof at the back.

That is not in any archive. It is in here, now, which is the only reason I wrote it down.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. The house and the block are documented by the Historic Reno Preservation Society and by Reno Historical, whose Historic University Gateway tour is the fullest public account of the twelve houses; the family history above is drawn from the Reno and Carson papers — James Atcheson's obituaries of 18 and 19 September 1933, Katie Atcheson's of 17 January 1947 and the estate notice of 26 January 1947, Henry Atcheson's of 23 January 1952, the Thompson–Atcheson wedding notices of 16 June and 4 July 1937, Merle Atcheson's promotion notice of 11 August 1965 and his front-page obituary of 6 February 1976. The 1949 Sanborn fire insurance sheets, which still label the street "University," are public domain at the Library of Congress. The timeline of the Gateway decisions is assembled from contemporary reporting by This Is Reno, the Reno News & Review, KUNR, News 4, the Nevada Sagebrush and the university's own announcements, and from the Historic Reno Preservation Society's FootPrints for Winter and Summer 2019. The account of living in the houses is my own.

• Historic University Gateway (In Memoriam) — Reno Historical — the full walking tour of all thirteen houses, each with its own history and photographs. The single best source on this block.
• The Atcheson House, 829 N. Center Street — Reno Historical — the house itself, with the c. 1900 porch photograph and the 1913 view from the university gates.
• The Berry House, 839 N. Center Street — Reno Historical — the house next door, and Bill Berry's fifty-six years in it.
• “The Last Tour of the Gateway Homes,” FootPrints Summer 2019 (PDF) — Debbie Hinman's house-by-house status list as it stood months before the demolitions.
• “Fight for Center Street Historic Homes Intensifies,” FootPrints Winter 2019 (PDF) — the request for proposals, the withdrawal, and the open letter.
• Frederic DeLongchamps: The Mining Engineer Who Built Nevada — the architect whose adopted son Galen and daughter-in-law Joanne lived four doors down at 821 N. Center.