The Atcheson House: Four Generations on Center Street

There is a photograph in the 1913 university yearbook taken from the stone gateposts at the top of Center Street, looking south down the avenue toward town. The street is dirt. Young trees line both sides. On the right, above the rooflines, there is a conical turret with a finial on top, the kind of thing a Queen Anne builder put on a house when he wanted the neighbors to know he had done well.

That turret stood on the same spot for a hundred and twenty-five years. I know the house it belonged to better than I know most buildings in Reno, because for several years I lived in it. My landlord was a lawyer named Fred Atcheson, and the house had been his family's since the 1940s.

It came down in June of 2020. A five-story business school opened on the ground in August of 2025. This is the story of the house, the four generations who held it, the farm and the trains that were there before any of it, and the years in which the university that is written all over this family's history decided it needed the lot.

University Avenue

The ground south of the campus was ranch land before it was anything. Two brothers from Defiance, Ohio, Alvaro and John Newton Evans, owned it from Fifth Street north to what is now McCarran Boulevard. Newt Evans built his mansion in 1878 in the middle of an alfalfa field, and it stood alone out there until he sold the state the ten acres on the hill for the university in 1885. In 1889 his brother Alvaro sold the block between Virginia and Center, from Eighth to Ninth, to a financier named A. G. Fletcher, who cut it into fourteen lots.

In August of 1895 a Reno grocer named Lewis D. Folsom bought the lot in the middle of the block for four hundred and fifty dollars. Folsom was a Maine man who had come to Nevada in 1874 and kept a store in Gold Hill before moving down to Reno and buying out an established grocery with a partner. He hired George E. Holesworth, who that same year was appointed the university's supervising architect, and Holesworth gave him a two-story, eight-room Queen Anne with spindle trim over the porch and windows, a turret roofed in fish-scale shingles, a modern range, gas and electric light in every room, and a dumb waiter of shelves that rode down to the cellar at the push of a finger. The foundation was cut from Robert Fulton's quarry north of town.

When it was finished that December it was written up as a house that had no equal in Reno for architectural beauty and modern convenience. Folsom died in 1918 and his widow Mary stayed on for years.

One detail worth holding onto: the street was not called Center Street up there. The stretch running up to the university gates was University Avenue, and the fire-insurance maps were still numbering the houses that way in 1949: 805, 815, 821, 829, 839, 847, 853 and 859 University. The six houses on the west side of that block between Eighth and Ninth were, by the end, believed to be the last intact row of nineteenth-century houses in the city.

Sweetwater

The Atcheson story does not begin on Center Street. It begins on a cattle ranch at Sweetwater, in the high country south of Smith Valley on the California line, and it begins with a sixteen-year-old from Belfast.

James C. Atcheson was born in Ireland in 1866, landed in the United States in 1882, and came west a year later to work on the ranch of his uncle, Henry Williams, one of the pioneer ranchers of Sweetwater. He stayed in the cattle business for thirty-six years.

The girl he married was a Williams too, by adoption. Katie Jolly was born in Michigan on June 15, 1871, and came west as a small child with her parents, who settled at Virginia City. Her mother died soon after they arrived, and the girl was taken in by the Henry Williams family and raised at Sweetwater, where she went to school. James Atcheson married her at Aurora on an April day in the 1880s. He was about twenty. She was still in her teens.

They settled on a Sweetwater ranch and raised six children there: Henry, Hazel, Margaret, Ruth, Chester and Donald, every one of them born on the place. In 1919 James sold out his cattle interests and the couple retired to Reno, to a house at 111 Elm Street. He was an Odd Fellow, a member of Unity Lodge No. 6, and when he died of a heart attack at home on September 18, 1933, he was remembered as a man identified for many years with the Nevada livestock industry. Katie outlived him by fourteen years.

That is the farm the family remembered: a cattle outfit in the Sweetwater country, three generations back from Fred, in a place most people in Reno have never driven through.

A Ranger's Son and a Dean's Daughter

The eldest son, Henry W. Atcheson, was born at Sweetwater on September 5, 1887. He went to work for the United States Forest Service in 1909, four years after it was created, and he stayed with it for thirty-six years, finishing as a district ranger in the Bridgeport country. He made his home in Gardnerville for forty years, married a woman named Anna, and raised three children: Merle, Ruth and Dorothy.

Merle H. Atcheson was born in Gardnerville on September 29, 1912. He went up to the University of Nevada, joined Alpha Tau Omega, and came out in 1935 with a degree in electrical engineering and a job at the Sierra Pacific Power Company, where he started as a meter tester.

Two years later, on the Fourth of July, 1937, he married Mary Adeline Thompson in her parents' house on Riverside Drive. Her father read the service himself. He was Dean Reuben C. Thompson, who had come to the university in 1908 to build up the classics program, founded its Department of Philosophy, taught Greek, and had been Dean of Men since 1932. The 1920 Education Building on the quad, the brick Georgian one by Frederic DeLongchamps, was renamed the Thompson Building in his honor in 1959. It is still there.

And here is the thread that nobody has pulled before. Around 1917, Reuben Thompson lived at 821 North Center Street, the spindled Queen Anne two doors south of the Folsom house. Mary, the younger of his two daughters, would have been a small child in that house. She grew up, graduated from the university, joined Pi Beta Phi, taught two years in the Hawthorne schools, and was described on her wedding day as a talented musician who had always been more than generous with her playing for church and social affairs.

The wedding was deliberately quiet. Only relatives and a few intimate friends. Yellow and white flowers through the house, no music, the couple unattended, the bride in blue sheer crepe. A wedding breakfast, then the two of them drove off by motor for an unknown destination, and were at home to their friends at 652 Forest Street after the first of August. The bride's sister Doris came from New York City for it.

The House Comes Into the Family

Around 1943, Katie Atcheson, by then a widow of seventy-two, bought the Folsom house at 829 North Center. She did not move into it. She was still living at the house on Elm Street when she died there on January 16, 1947, and the estate she left, a little under forty thousand dollars, was substantial money for a ranch widow in Reno that year. Her son Henry, the forest ranger, was named executor with her attorney, and the six children were her heirs.

Henry did not have it long. He died at the Carson-Tahoe hospital on January 17, 1952, after five weeks there, and was buried in the family plot at Mountain View Cemetery in Reno. The house on Center Street came down to his son.

So the record that says the house passed from Katie to her son Merle is right in spirit and off by a generation. It went from a grandmother to a grandson, by way of a ranger who held it for five years and never lived in it either.

Merle and Mary did live in it, with four children: Sallie, born in 1938, then Jim, Steve and Fred. By 1960 the family's address, whenever it appeared in print, was 829 North Center. Mary, two doors from the house where she had been a small girl, went on playing. Her name turns up for years at recitals, at the Pi Beta Phi luncheons, at the Libby Booth parent-teacher meetings, and later at devotional services at the Reno Unity Center, which met in the Queen Anne house two doors north of her front door.

Jim was elected student body president of the university in March of 1963, campaigning on a ski injury and beating his opponent by 266 votes. He and Steve became doctors. Fred became a lawyer.

Turn On Your Light Switch

Merle Atcheson spent thirty-nine years at Sierra Pacific Power and ended as its senior vice president. Meter tester, electrician, assistant engineer, engineer in charge, vice president for engineering in 1960, operations vice president, senior vice president in 1965, retired on June 1, 1974. The Reno engineers named him their Engineer of the Year in 1971. When he died, on February 6, 1976, at sixty-three, it was front-page news, and a former president of the company, Frank Tracy, said simply that the result of his work was evident in the power company today.

Two things from that front page deserve to be remembered.

The first is a story the company's public relations man, Walt MacKenzie, said Atcheson loved to tell. In the years when KOH was the only radio station in Reno, and Atcheson was a young man in the engineering department, the announcer would put a question to the town over the air, and tell everyone who favored the idea to turn on their light switch. Down at the power company, Atcheson read the voltage and the generating output. Then the announcer told everyone who opposed it to switch on, and Atcheson read the load again. That, MacKenzie said, is how public opinion was first surveyed in Reno: by a young engineer watching the meters while a whole city turned its lights on and off.

The second is policy, and it is why your lights stay on. It was Atcheson's idea that Nevada should not keep all of its generating plants in one place, so that a single fire or catastrophe could not take the state down with it. After the Donner Summit fire in the early 1960s, he pushed for generating plants on the Nevada side of the Sierra, so that the state would not be left open to blackouts by a fire on the far side of the mountains. The scattered plants that power northern Nevada today are, in part, a man from Gardnerville thinking about what a fire on the summit could do.

Fred

Fred Hill Atcheson, the youngest, went to McGeorge School of Law and was admitted to the Nevada bar in 1976, the year his father died. He practiced in Reno for decades, and he did what a great many people on that block had done since the Depression: he divided the big house into apartments and rented them to university students.

In 1999 he bought the house next door as well, the two-story Queen Anne at 839 that had been the Berry family's home for fifty-six years, and converted that one too. By 2005 there were six mailboxes on the porch of 839. Between the two houses, Fred Atcheson was the landlord of a fair slice of the block for the better part of twenty years, and if you were a student or a young person in Reno in those years who wanted to live in a hundred-year-old house a block from campus, there was a decent chance you rented from him. I did.

The houses were not museum pieces. They were lived in hard by young people, which is what they had been built for in a sense, since the whole block went up because the university had just arrived at the top of the street. But the fish-scale turret was still on the roof, the spindles were still on the porch, and the stone foundation Holesworth laid in 1895 was still holding the whole thing up.

The Field, the Sidings, and the Coffee House

Walk east from the house in your mind, the way it was before 2019.

Across Center Street and across Lake, between Lake and Evans Avenue, there was an open block. On the 1949 fire-insurance map it is the only open block in the neighborhood: a field with a single building near its center and the Orr Ditch cutting across the bottom of it. That is Evans Park, two acres that the Evans estate deeded to the city in 1929 on condition that it stay a park forever. It is the last piece of Newt Evans's alfalfa field that was never built on, and it is the farm that was there. In 2016 the university asked the city for it. The parks commission voted no.

Past Evans Avenue were the tracks. The line that runs north out of Reno along the east side of Evans is the old Nevada-California-Oregon Railway, the narrow gauge that was built north from Fourth Street in the 1880s and sold to the Western Pacific in 1917. Its brick depot and machine shop still stand on Fourth Street, at the other end of the line. North of Ninth Street the main line fans out on the old maps into four or five parallel tracks and nothing else: sidings, storage tracks, a place to hold cars. The street alongside them was called East Street in 1949. It is Record Street now.

Sometime after 1955 the railroad put up a plain maintenance building on that wedge of ground at Ninth and Record, with the storage tracks across what became its parking lot. That building had a second life. It was the Record Street Café, then briefly the Record Street Brewing Company, and from February 2010 it was Bibo Coffee, the shop that a decade of students, professors, firefighters and Union Pacific engineers treated as their living room. Bibo closed on Thursday, October 10, 2019. The owners let the regulars write on the blank walls on the way out. The building was taken down for the university's expansion.

Farm, railroad, house, coffee shop. Every layer of that corner was still readable from the porch at 829 until the autumn of 2019.

The Gateway

In December of 2014 the university adopted a master plan that drew a box around the blocks between Ninth Street and the freeway and called it the Campus Gateway Precinct. Every house inside the box was to be replaced with new buildings. The university already owned several of them. It set about buying the rest.

Fred sold 839 to the university in December of 2015 and 829 early in 2016. The city council balked that spring; the university said nothing would be built for three years. In April of 2018 the university put out a formal request offering twelve of the houses free to anyone who would move them. Seven people bid. Two bids were judged complete. A proposal to move the whole row to Evans Park as a historic district was turned down. In November of 2018 the university announced that ten of the houses would be demolished, and the preservation society launched a petition and an open letter. The regents approved the plan on June 7, 2019.

Four houses were moved. The Asian-styled Craftsman from Eighth Street went to Arlington Avenue in April of 2019. The Mack house from Lake Street went to Plumas Street in June of 2020. Dean Thompson's old house at 821, the one Mary Atcheson had lived in as a child, was hauled to West Taylor Street, and the Riegg house at 820, the one the block called the Dutch House, went to Lander Street. Eight were demolished. The Unity Center and Fred's second house at 839 came down in November of 2019. The Atcheson house came down in June of 2020.

The seven-story parking garage on the Lake Street side opened in January of 2023. The John Tulloch Business Building, five stories and a hundred and twenty-eight thousand square feet, opened on the Center Street side on August 26, 2025. A life-sciences building is to break ground across the street this fall.

Up the hill, a few hundred yards north of where the turret stood, the Thompson Building still carries the name of the dean whose grandson's house the university cleared to build it all.

At a Glance: The Atcheson House

• Address: 829 North Center Street, Reno, on the west side of the block between Eighth and Ninth, a block south of the university gates. The street was University Avenue there into the 1950s.
• Built: 1895, for grocer Lewis D. Folsom, who paid $450 for the lot that August. Architect and builder George E. Holesworth, named the university's supervising architect the same year.
• What it was: a two-story, eight-room Queen Anne with spindle trim, a fish-scale turret, gas and electric light in every room, a dumb waiter to the cellar, and a foundation from Robert Fulton's quarry.
• The land before it: the Evans brothers' ranch, from Fifth Street to McCarran. Sold to A. G. Fletcher in 1889 and cut into fourteen lots.
• The farm in the family: a cattle ranch at Sweetwater, where James C. Atcheson of Belfast worked for his uncle from 1883, married Katie Williams in the 1880s, and raised six children before selling out and moving to Reno in 1919.
• Who owned it: Folsom family 1895 to about 1943; Katie Atcheson from about 1943 until her death in January 1947; her son Henry W. Atcheson, Forest Service ranger, until his death in January 1952; his son Merle H. Atcheson and Mary Thompson Atcheson; their son Fred Hill Atcheson, attorney, who sold to the University of Nevada, Reno, early in 2016.
• The dean's daughter: Mary was the younger daughter of Reuben C. Thompson, Dean of Men, founder of the philosophy department, who lived at 821 North Center around 1917. The campus Thompson Building was named for him in 1959.
• The engineer: Merle Atcheson, Sierra Pacific Power 1935 to 1974, senior vice president, Engineer of the Year 1971, the man who argued for spreading Nevada's power plants out. Died February 6, 1976.
• Fred's block: 829 divided into student apartments; 839 North Center bought in 1999 and converted too. Sold to the university December 2015 and early 2016.
• The trains: the old N-C-O line, Western Pacific from 1917, runs north along Evans Avenue; north of Ninth it fans into storage sidings. The railroad maintenance building that later housed Bibo Coffee at 945 Record Street was built after 1955 and taken down after Bibo closed on October 10, 2019.
• The Gateway: master plan December 2014; twelve houses offered for relocation April 2018; demolition announced November 2018; regents' approval June 7, 2019; four houses moved, eight demolished. 829 demolished June 2020.
• What is there now: the Gateway Parking Complex (opened January 20, 2023) and the John Tulloch Business Building (opened August 26, 2025). Evans Park survives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the Atcheson family's farm on Center Street?

No. The family farm was a cattle ranch at Sweetwater, south of Smith Valley near the California line, where James and Katie Atcheson raised their children before retiring to Reno in 1919. The farm that was on the Gateway ground was the Evans ranch, and the one piece of it never built on is Evans Park, the open block between Lake Street and Evans Avenue that the Evans estate gave the city in 1929.

Is it Atcheson or Acheson?

Atcheson, with a t, in every document from the 1933 death notices to the bar rolls. The one exception is the student newspaper of 1963, which spelled Jim's name Acheson the week it reported him elected student body president. Spoken aloud the t disappears, which is why so many people who knew Fred write it that way.

Who was Dean Thompson?

Reuben C. Thompson came to the University of Nevada in 1908, founded its philosophy department, taught Greek, and served as Dean of Men from 1932 until his retirement in 1948. The 1920 Education Building was renamed the Thompson Building for him in 1959 and now holds student services offices. His younger daughter Mary married Merle Atcheson in 1937, and the house Thompson rented around 1917, at 821 North Center, was two doors from the one his daughter later lived in.

Why was the house demolished rather than moved?

The university offered twelve Gateway houses free to anyone who could prove they owned land to move them to and could pay for the move. Four found takers. The Atcheson house was listed as pending a letter of intent in the summer of 2019 and no move was arranged. It was demolished in June of 2020 for the business school site.

What was the Bibo Coffee building?

A railroad maintenance building on the Western Pacific's line north out of Reno, at Ninth and Record, built sometime after 1955 beside the storage sidings that are still on the 1955 maps. It was a café and then a brewpub before Bibo Coffee opened there in February 2010. Bibo closed October 10, 2019, and the building was removed for the university's expansion.

Can you see any of it today?

You can stand at the university gates at the top of Center Street and look south, as the 1913 photographer did. The row of houses is gone and the business building fills the view. Evans Park is still open ground. The Thompson Building is on the quad. Four of the Gateway houses survive in other neighborhoods: on Arlington Avenue, Plumas Street, West Taylor Street and Lander Street.

Conclusion

A house is a container for a family's luck. This one held a hundred and twenty-five years of it.

A Belfast teenager comes west to his uncle's cattle ranch and marries his uncle's adopted daughter. Their son spends his life in the national forests. His son wires up the power company and marries the dean's daughter from two doors down. Their son becomes a lawyer and fills his great-grandmother's house with students, one of whom is writing this. And the thing that connects every generation of it, the thing the widow bought and the ranger passed on and the engineer raised his children in and the lawyer rented out, is a wooden house with a turret that a Maine grocer built in 1895 because the university had just arrived at the top of his street.

The university is why the house was built, and the university is why it is gone. I do not think that is a paradox so much as the plain shape of the thing. The campus made that block valuable in 1895 and it made it valuable again in 2014, and the second time there was nothing in between the value and the ground.

What I keep coming back to is not the demolition. It is the morning in 1913 when somebody set up a camera between the stone gateposts and pointed it down University Avenue at the turret. The trees were young. The street was dirt. The house was eighteen years old and the Atchesons had not yet heard of it. Everything in that photograph except the gateposts is gone, and the gateposts are the reason everything else was there.

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 construction details of 1895 come from the Reno paper of December 31, 1895, and from the Historic Reno Preservation Society's work on the block. The family history is drawn from the Reno papers: the death notices of September 18 and 19, 1933; the betrothal and wedding of June 16 and July 4, 1937; the obituary and estate notice of January 17 and 26, 1947; the funeral notice of January 23, 1952; the promotion of August 11, 1965; and the front page of February 6, 1976. The street name, the open block and the railroad sidings are on the Sanborn fire-insurance maps of 1949 and 1955 at the Library of Congress.

• Atcheson House (site): Folsom House, Reno Historical — the Historic Reno Preservation Society's page on 829 North Center, with the 1895 newspaper notice, the c. 1900 photograph and the 1913 yearbook view.
• Historic University Gateway (In Memoriam), Reno Historical — all thirteen houses of the neighborhood, with their histories and fates.
• Artemisia, 1913, University of Nevada — the full yearbook, scanned by the university libraries and in the public domain. The gates photograph is leaf 85.
• Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Reno, 1949, Library of Congress — sheets 37, 38 and 62 cover University Avenue, the open block and the railroad sidings. Public domain.
• Thompson Building, Reno Historical — the 1920 Education Building by DeLongchamps, renamed for Reuben C. Thompson in 1959.
• Frederic DeLongchamps: The Mining Engineer Who Built Nevada — the architect of the Thompson Building and of a number of the campus buildings the Gateway now serves.
• Under Reno: The Tunnels Beneath Downtown — the railroad corridor through downtown Reno, at the other end of the line that runs past Record Street.
• The Pillars on McCarran: Eight Lives of the Flick Ranch — another Reno house that outlived the ranch it was built on, and the eight families who held it.