Auburn: The Mill Town That Was Here Before Reno

There is a stereo card, printed in San Francisco and sold to people who wanted to see the West without going there, numbered 701. The caption under the twin photographs reads: Interior of English Co.'s Quartz Mill — near Reno. What it shows is a long timber room with roof trusses overhead, lit by a few windows, and filling the floor in rows, like vats in a brewery, a battery of circular iron pans and settlers with wooden ladders propped against them so the men could climb up and work the charges. Three or four of those men are standing among the machinery, holding still for the exposure.

That room stood where Wedekind Road meets Sutro Street, just north of Oddie Boulevard, on the line between Reno and Sparks. There was a town around it called Auburn. It was surveyed before Reno existed, and almost nobody has heard of it.

A Town Before There Was a Town

In 1863 the Truckee Meadows was not a place with a center. It was ranches and hay and a scatter of stations along the roads that fed the Comstock: Jamison's on the river, Stone and Gates' crossing, Huffaker's down south, the Junction House, and Myron Lake's toll bridge where Virginia Street crosses the Truckee today. Washoe City, over the hill, was the county seat. Reno was five years from existing.

Into that, in 1863, somebody recorded a survey with the Washoe County Recorder for a town of Auburn, laid out to house the workers of a mill that had not been built yet. The town sat just below the mill site. That is an unusual order of operations and it tells you what kind of enterprise this was: not a camp that grew, but a company town drawn on paper first, by people with money and a plan.

The English Company

The money was British. The company was the Washoe United Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company, Limited, and everybody around the Meadows simply called it the English Company — which is why the mill it built was the English Mill for the rest of its life, even when the locals also called it the Auburn Mill.

Three men ran it on this side of the Atlantic. William Boyle designed the mill and managed it. William Sydney O'Connor was the promoter, and it was O'Connor who went to the courthouse on December 26, 1863 and filed a Notice of Claim to Water Privilege on the Truckee River. Joseph Charles Ridge was the company's attorney. Shares in the Washoe United Consolidated were printed and sold in 1864 and 1865, and some of them still turn up in collectors' hands, which is its own quiet proof that this was a real floated company and not a local partnership.

The water claim mattered more than anything else. A twenty-stamp mill is a machine for turning water and wood into bullion, and the Truckee was the only reliable water in the valley. Two months earlier, in October 1863, Horace and Alexander Countryman had recorded their own survey for a dam and a thirty-five-hundred-foot ditch "toward a proposed mill." The Countrymans were a ranching family on the north bank, and Peter and Alexander Countryman show up as millwrights in the Nevada territorial directory of 1863. In September 1865, three of the Countryman brothers sold their claims and water rights to Boyle and Ridge for thirty-eight hundred dollars, and that was that.

Three and a Half Miles of Water

What they built to feed the mill was the English Ditch: three and a half miles of hand-dug channel running from the north bank of the Truckee, across the ranches, out to the mill site on the rise. It was finished in June 1865, and the mill came up behind it the same year.

Hold onto the ditch. It is the part of this story that outlived everything else. It was still carrying water in 1876, still a going concern people fought over. And as late as 1945 — eighty years after it was dug, when the men who dug it were long dead and the mill was a memory — the city was still dealing with it, laying a large pipe through the Conductor Heights neighborhood to tame the English Mill Ditch water and stop it flooding people's houses. A British mining company's water channel was still inconveniencing Reno in the year the Second World War ended.

Twenty Stamps

The mill had twenty stamps — twenty iron shoes lifted by cams and dropped onto ore in boxes, pounding rock to sand all day and all night. The sound carried for miles and the men who worked around them went deaf.

What happens after the stamps is what the photograph shows. The crushed ore went into those circular pans with mullers grinding in them, mixed with water, mercury, salt and copper sulphate, and heated. That is the Washoe process, the thing Nevada invented to get silver out of its own particular rock, and the pans and settlers in rows down that timber floor are the whole of it. The amalgam was retorted; what came out the other end was bullion.

It was a serious plant, and it was aimed at the obvious market — the Comstock was twenty miles up the hill throwing off more ore than the mills on the Carson River could handle, and mills were going up anywhere there was water to run them. What the records do not say is where this mill's ore actually came from in its first years. That silence is worth noting rather than papering over. The one load we can name came later, and it came from somewhere else entirely.

Then Reno Happened

In the spring of 1868 the Central Pacific came through the Meadows, Myron Lake traded land for a depot, and the railroad auctioned town lots at the crossing. Reno existed from that moment, and everything in the valley reorganized itself around the tracks within a few years.

Auburn did not survive it. It had been laid out five years earlier as a place for mill hands to live, two and a half miles from a railroad nobody had built yet, and once there was a real town with a depot and a bank and a hotel, nobody wanted to live out on the rise by the stamps. The camp emptied. The mill kept running, which is the thing people get wrong when they call Auburn a ghost town: the town died first and the industry outlived it by twenty years.

Seventeen Tons of Pyramid Ore

By the mid-1870s the mill was operating as the Auburn Mill and Mining Company, with a superintendent named O. Evans, and the clearest surviving glimpse of it is a notice Evans put in the paper in the autumn of 1876. He hereby forbade any person putting dead animals or filth of any kind into the company's ditch, and promised to prosecute anyone caught doing so, adding that a word in time should be sufficient. Eleven years after it was dug, the English Ditch was still running and the neighbors were still using it as a place to throw dead stock.

Then, in June 1877, the best single paragraph anyone ever wrote about this place. The mill had a clean-up. Two men named Alt and Bishop, with others, worked it through the day and brought in that evening what the local paper called the nicest bar of bullion Washoe County had yet turned out. It weighed fifty-five pounds, ran over eight hundred fine, and was worth about eight hundred dollars. It was the product of seventeen tons of Pyramid ore — ore from the Pyramid district, north of Reno toward the lake, not from the Comstock at all — and it averaged nearly fifty dollars to the ton. The report ends with the kind of line that tells you the real situation: the proposal now was to lease the mill and keep her running. We will all be happy yet.

That is a twenty-stamp mill, built by a British company with a three-and-a-half-mile ditch, being kept alive twelve years later on borrowed ore and hope.

Alfalfa

The mill did not blow up or burn down. It was simply beaten by arithmetic, and then the land was put to a use that paid.

In the summer of 1887 the paper reported, in a column about how healthy and bright Reno's prospects were, that Bradley and Russell of Elko and a state senator named M. D. Foley of Eureka had bought the old English mill property and were making improvements. They had already seeded a good many acres of it down in alfalfa. The previous owner, a man named Brown, had done nothing with it, and the change of ownership, the paper said, would be a great benefit.

That is the end of the story, and it is a very Nevada ending. The British capital, the twenty stamps, the pans and settlers, the surveyed townsite, the ditch — all of it resolved, twenty-four years after that water claim was filed, into a hay field.

The Same Hill, Thirty Years Later

Here is the part that stopped me when I put the two stories side by side.

The English Mill stood near Wedekind Road and Sutro Street. In 1896 a Reno piano dealer named George Wedekind picked up a crumbling piece of yellow rock in the hills a couple of miles north of the new town of Sparks, and by 1900 he had located a silver mine there; by 1902 there was a camp on the hill called Wedekind City, with thirty buildings, a telephone line and electric light, and a thirty-ton mill owned by the man the city of Sparks is named for.

Same ground. Same few blocks of north-east Truckee Meadows. Two complete boom-and-bust cycles, a generation apart, both of them gone so thoroughly that the only trace either left is a street name. Auburn did not even get that much — the name on the road is Wedekind's.

And both of them are now under houses, a landscaping yard, and people driving to work who have no idea.

At a Glance: Auburn and the English Mill

• The town: Auburn, surveyed and recorded with the Washoe County Recorder in 1863, to house mill workers; it lay just below the mill. Five years before Reno existed.
• Where: near Wedekind Road and Sutro Street, just north of Oddie Boulevard, on the Reno–Sparks line — about two and a half miles north-east of downtown Reno.
• The company: the Washoe United Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company, Limited — "the English Company." Share certificates dated 1864 and 1865 survive.
• The men: William Boyle designed and managed the mill; William Sydney O'Connor promoted it and filed the Truckee water claim on December 26, 1863; Joseph Charles Ridge was company attorney.
• The water: the English Ditch, three and a half miles from the north bank of the Truckee, completed June 1865, over land bought from the Countryman family for $3,800 that September.
• The mill: twenty stamps, completed 1865; pans and settlers running the Washoe amalgamation process, photographed for a Thomas Houseworth stereo card as "Interior of English Co.'s Quartz Mill — near Reno."
• The collapse of the town: Reno founded spring 1868; Auburn emptied within a few years while the mill kept working.
• Still running: the Auburn Mill and Mining Company, Superintendent O. Evans, 1876; a clean-up in June 1877 by Alt, Bishop and others produced a 55-pound bar, over 800 fine, worth about $800, from seventeen tons of Pyramid ore.
• The end: by July 1887 the old English mill property had been bought by Bradley and Russell of Elko and Senator M. D. Foley of Eureka and was being seeded to alfalfa.
• Afterlife: the English Mill Ditch was still being piped to stop flooding in Conductor Heights in 1945. The Wedekind silver boom of 1900–1905 happened on the same ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Auburn, Nevada?

At the north-east edge of the Truckee Meadows, near where Wedekind Road meets Sutro Street just north of Oddie Boulevard, on the boundary between Reno and Sparks — roughly two and a half miles north-east of downtown Reno. Two independent lines of research, one from county deed records and one from the standard ghost-town literature, put it in the same few blocks.

Is Auburn the same as Wedekind City?

No, but they are neighbors in space and strangers in time. Auburn was a quartz-milling town platted in 1863; Wedekind City was a silver camp that rose in 1900 and was finished by 1905. They occupy essentially the same corner of north Sparks, thirty-odd years apart.

Why have I never heard of Auburn?

Because it was over almost before it started, and because nothing was left to photograph. It is missing from the standard Nevada ghost-town lists, from the state's historical marker program, and from the published histories of Reno. What exists is a line in the county history, a paragraph in one ghost-town book, deeds in the Recorder's office, a few newspaper items, and one stereo card.

Was the mill processing Comstock ore?

Nobody has written down where its ore came from in the 1860s, and the honest answer is that we do not know. The one documented run, in June 1877, was seventeen tons of Pyramid ore from north of Reno — not the Comstock. Mills of that era took whatever ore would pay to haul.

Is anything left?

Traces of the mill ditches have been reported on the ground, and the ditch itself was enough of a problem to be piped in 1945. Everything else is under houses and pavement.

Conclusion

Reno likes to date itself from 1868, from the railroad and the lot auction, as though the valley were empty before the tracks arrived. It was not. Five years earlier there was already a surveyed townsite out on the north-east rise, with British money behind it, a water claim on the Truckee, a ditch three and a half miles long, and twenty stamps on the way. It had a name. It even had its portrait taken, and the card sold in a San Francisco shop to people who would never come west.

Then a railroad put a depot two and a half miles away and the town simply stopped. The mill ground on for twenty more years, got its one good bar of bullion out of somebody else's ore, and finished as a hay field. The last thing anyone said about it in print was that the new owners had seeded it down in alfalfa and this would be a great benefit.

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 period newspaper items drawn on here are the Nevada State Journal of November 4, 1876 (Superintendent O. Evans's notice about the Auburn Mill and Mining Company's ditch), the Nevada State Journal of June 10, 1877 ("Auburn Mill Clean Up," the fifty-five-pound bar from seventeen tons of Pyramid ore), the Reno Evening Gazette of July 29, 1887 (the sale of the old English mill property and the alfalfa), and the Reno Evening Gazette of July 18, 1879 (a birth at the English Mill). The deeds, water claims and the 1863 town survey are public records of the Washoe County Recorder.

• Kim Henrick, "Where is Horace's House?", FootPrints (Historic Reno Preservation Society), Summer 2014 — the essential modern account, built from Washoe County Recorder deeds and federal land patents; the source for the mill's company, its principals and the 1863 Auburn survey.
• Kim Henrick, "Prejudice to Pride: the State Hospital's Historic Cemetery", FootPrints, Spring 2011 — records the 1945 piping of the English Mill Ditch at Conductor Heights.
• History of Washoe County (Washoe County) — lists Auburn among the settlements existing in 1865.
• New York Public Library Digital Collections: "Interior of English Co.'s quartz mill — near Reno" — the stereo card itself.
• Nevada Historical Society — photographs, maps and manuscripts for Washoe County milling and ranching.
• Sparks Museum & Cultural Center — the local authority on this ground, with a research centre on Victorian Avenue.

Hero image: "Interior of English Co.'s Quartz Mill — near Reno," stereograph no. 701 from the Nevada series published by Thomas Houseworth & Co., San Francisco. New York Public Library Digital Collections; public domain.