The Field Matron's Cottage, Reno: The Stone Building on the Indian Colony's First Twenty Acres

Above: the Field Matron’s Cottage at 1995 East Second Street, Reno, seen from the south-east. Photographed in August 2014 and released to the public domain.

There is a row of yellow diamond signs bolted to steel posts along the front of it. They say WATCH FOR PEDESTRIANS AND VEHICLES WHILE BACKING UP.

Behind them is a wall of river cobble — pink, rust, cream, grey-green, and here and there a lump of something black and volcanic — laid up in wide beds of mortar by a working mason who knew exactly what he was doing. Above the stone, a composition-shingle roof with a deep overhang. On the roof, an evaporative cooler bolted through the shingles. In the wall, aluminium sliding windows that do not belong there.

It is a National Register building. It has been one since 2003. It sits on the oldest ground the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony owns, a few yards from the shoulder of a freeway, and the cars in front of it back up to within a foot of the stonework.

The Washoe County assessor does not carry it. There is no parcel numbered 1995 East Second Street on the current roll at all. The nearest thing is a half-acre of federal trust land, zoning code TL, carded as vacant.

Which is the first clue that this is not an ordinary building on an ordinary street, and that the usual places you would look to find out about a house are the wrong places.

Twenty Acres and a Ranch

Start with the ground, because the ground came first and the ground is the point.

On the eighteenth of May 1916, an Act of Congress authorised money to buy homes and farm sites for Indian people in Nevada who had none. Nevada at that time had reservations at Pyramid Lake and Walker River and a scatter of small allotments, and it had a large number of Paiute and Washoe families living at the edges of its towns on ground that belonged to somebody else.

In April 1917 the United States Indian Service spent six thousand dollars.

What it bought was twenty acres of ranch land with water rights, south of the Truckee River, between Reno and Sparks. That is the whole description the record gives. Twenty acres, water, and a position in the gap between the two towns.

The man who did the buying was Lorenzo D. Creel, a former agent at the Pyramid Lake reservation who had become the Indian Service’s specialist in acquiring land in Nevada. The special agent in charge of the Reno office was C. H. Asbury.

Who sold it has not been established. The nomination that documents the purchase does not name the seller, and no account since has gone looking. Somebody was ranching twenty irrigated acres between Reno and Sparks in the spring of 1917, and somebody took six thousand dollars for it, and their name is sitting in a deed book nobody has opened.

That matters more than it sounds. A twenty-acre piece with water, on the flat between two towns, is good ground. It is the kind of parcel that gets subdivided rather than sold whole. The government got it in the middle of a war, at the moment when every acre of hay in Nevada was suddenly worth arguing about.

Make Farm Hands Out of Loafers

Here is what else was happening in Reno that month.

The United States had declared war on the sixth of April 1917. On the twenty-fifth, the state committee on food resources met at the Commercial Club in Reno to work out how Nevada was going to feed itself and the army. The next morning the meeting was written up under this headline:

“State Food Committee Will Endeavor to Make Farm Hands Out of Loafers”

The special feature of the meeting, the report said, was the consideration of the Indian labour question. And then, verbatim:

“Indian laborers make good farm hands, and they are much used throughout the state of Nevada, in all the farming country. Still, in the present emergency, it is going to be necessary to break up their habit of loafing around the towns and get them out into the hayfields to work. The committee decided that every effort should be made by every association of farmers in Nevada to put a prompt stop to the sale of liquor to Indians. Indians are good farm laborers but a drunken Indian is worse than useless.”

Two men represented the United States Indian Service at that meeting. One was Colonel Dorrington, special commissioner to Nevada. The other was Lorenzo D. Creel, former agent at Pyramid Lake.

The same two men. The same month. One of them was out buying twenty acres so that Indian families would have somewhere of their own to live between Reno and Sparks, and both of them were sitting in a room at the Commercial Club while a committee of farmers resolved to break up the habit of loafing around the towns.

Both things are true and they were done by the same agency, and anyone who wants to understand what a federal Indian policy actually was in 1917 can start there. The Service bought the land. The Service also wanted the people on it in the hayfields by June.

Twenty Outhouses at Eight Dollars Each

Having bought the ground, the government built almost nothing on it.

A federal report in 1920, three years after the purchase, set out what the Colony had been given. The sentence is short enough to quote whole:

“The only structures provided to the Colony were 20 outhouses at a cost of $8 each.”

One hundred and sixty dollars. That is the entire capital improvement programme for the first three years: twenty privies, eight dollars apiece.

Everything else on those twenty acres, people built themselves. A census taken in 1929, twelve years in, describes small shacks. Of all the buildings standing on the Colony that year, seven had electric light, and four of those seven belonged to the government. There had been a temporary building for religious and other meetings, put up at a cost of one hundred dollars. The Indian Bureau had dug irrigation ditches, which is what you would expect on ground bought for its water rights.

So the picture to hold in your head for the 1920s is this. Twenty irrigated acres on the flat between two towns. Several dozen families. Shacks. Ditches. Twenty outhouses. Three buildings with power that were not the government’s.

And into that, in 1926, somebody put up a stone cottage with a full basement, two chimneys and a pitched roof, built by professional masons out of quarried river rock.

What a Field Matron Was

The cottage is named for a job, and the job needs explaining before the building makes sense.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs employed field matrons. A field matron was a white woman sent to live among Indian families and instruct the women and girls in what the Bureau called sanitation and housekeeping. The programme ran nationally from the 1890s. It was, in plain terms, an assimilation programme carried out in kitchens rather than classrooms, and it sat alongside the boarding schools as the domestic half of the same policy.

Reno had one from 1919 to as late as 1938.

For the first seven of those years she did not live on the Colony. She lived in Reno and came out. The man who kept asking Washington to change that was L. A. Dorrington, Special Agent in Charge at Reno, who pressed for building funds in 1919 and again in 1920. He is, on the name and the office, the Colonel Dorrington who had sat at the food committee table two years earlier. Philip Lonergan was superintendent of the Reno Agency in 1921. Neither of them got the money.

It took until 1926, and a different superintendent, and a drawing.

The Christophers’ Stone

In 1925 the superintendent of the Reno Agency, James Jenkins, sketched what he wanted and costed it. The proposal was for a building one and a half storeys, thirty feet by twenty-six, with a full basement, stone-walled and cement floor, screened porches. He put the price at four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars.

The money came through the following year. What got built was a hundred and forty-five square feet bigger than what he had drawn.

The stonework was done by two local masons, James and John Christopher, working with Indian apprentices. The stone came out of the Christopher quarry on the Carson River, with some of the darker volcanic pieces thought to have come from Diamond Valley, over the California line near Markleeville.

And the style has a name. It is called Stewart Vernacular, after the Stewart Indian School at Carson City, where superintendent Frederick Snyder had established the pattern: multi-coloured native stone set in dark mortar, rubble walls with rubble quoins at the corners, a Craftsman feel and a bungalow arrangement. Stewart is full of it. Dozens of buildings, a whole campus of it, laid up by school labour out of local rock.

There is one building in that style in the Reno area. This is it.

The cottage as built is about nine hundred and twenty-five square feet, one storey, with a full basement under it and a ground-level hatch into the basement on the east side. The roof is a jerkinhead gable — a gable with its peak clipped off at an angle, which is a roof you see on English cottages and on American bungalows of the twenties and almost nowhere in between. Two stone chimneys, on the west wall and the north. A shallow porch running the full width of the front. A random rubble foundation, which on a building whose walls are also rubble means the stone simply comes up out of the ground and keeps going.

Whether the Christophers trained at Stewart, or learned the manner from it, or simply worked in the only idiom available to a mason handling Nevada river rock in 1926, is not documented. The record does not make the connection and neither will this.

A Library, an Infirmary, and a Morgue

It was built as a dwelling for one employee. It did not stay one.

The cottage held a library. It held an infirmary — the federal paperwork lists health care as one of its historic functions, and specifically a clinic. It was where the community met, because on twenty acres of shacks it was the only building with a room big enough and a floor worth standing on.

And elders remember something else about it, which is recorded in the nomination and which is the sort of detail that never makes it into an architectural description: the basement was used as a temporary morgue.

Think about what that implies. There was nowhere else. A community of several dozen families, a mile and a half from a city with undertakers in it, kept its dead in the cellar of the matron’s house because the cellar was cool and dry and it was theirs.

The building that was put up to teach housekeeping ended up doing the work of a clinic, a reading room, a hall and a mortuary, which is not what the Bureau designed it for and is a reasonably exact measure of what the Colony did not otherwise have.

The Eight-Acre Strip and the School

The same year the cottage went up, the Colony got bigger for the first and only time in its early life.

In 1926 the government bought a contiguous strip of 8.38 acres for about four thousand three hundred dollars — almost exactly what the cottage had cost. The reason given was that the strip allowed for a day school.

Twenty acres plus eight and a third. Twenty-eight acres. That is the original Colony, and the figure people still use for it.

The school did not last. It closed in the early 1940s, and the reason recorded is not falling numbers or policy: the building was in such disrepair. At some point before that, in 1927, a school was being run in the Colony’s Baptist church, which suggests the arrangement was improvised more than once.

Set the two 1926 purchases against each other and the priorities are legible. Four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars for a stone house for the matron, built by professional masons to last a century, and it has. About four thousand three hundred dollars of land for a school, in a building that was falling down inside fifteen years.

Tribal Police Department

The cottage was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on the sixteenth of May 2003, reference number 03000416. The nomination had been prepared the previous New Year’s Eve by Mella Rothwell Harmon of the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, and it was listed under two criteria at once: for its association with social welfare and Native American heritage, and for its architecture.

The photographs filed with it were taken on the sixteenth of February 2003, and they show what the building had become.

There is a sign in the window of the front porch gable. It reads TRIBAL POLICE DEPARTMENT. Painted on the kerb of the parking bays in front, one word to a bay: CHIEF. POLICE.

A cottage built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1926 to teach Paiute and Washoe girls housekeeping was, by 2003, the police station of a sovereign tribal government that had taken the ground back into its own hands and extended it from twenty-eight acres to more than fifteen thousand.

Nobody arranged that. It is simply what happened to the only good building on the place, which was handed one job after another for eighty years because it was there and it was solid.

The nomination’s verdict on the fabric was blunt and generous at once: “The building retains a remarkable degree of integrity.” Three things spoiled it — the modern aluminium slider windows, a 294 square foot addition on the back, and a modern pedestrian overpass standing in front of it. The tribal council had discussed putting the windows back and taking the addition off.

The Footbridge and the Parking Lot

It is still standing. As of the autumn of 2025 every one of the three faults the nomination listed is still there, and a fourth has joined them.

The windows are still aluminium sliders. The addition is still on the back, white-stuccoed against all that stone. And the pedestrian overpass is still in front — a long curved concrete ramp that spirals down off a bridge over East Second Street and lands a few feet from the cottage’s front steps, which is a sensible piece of engineering for anyone trying to cross six lanes on foot and a brutal thing to put in front of a listed building.

The fourth is the parking. The ground between the cottage and the road is now a car park, and the cars park nose-in to the stone. Hence the yellow diamonds on posts: WATCH FOR PEDESTRIANS AND VEHICLES WHILE BACKING UP.

Stand where the Street View camera stands and you can see, in one frame, a 1926 rubble-stone cottage, a roof-mounted swamp cooler, a row of reversing-hazard signs, a concrete footbridge ramp, and beyond all of it the embankment of United States Route 395.

That freeway is the reason the Colony’s original ground reads as an island today. It was driven through east Reno and it separated the twenty-eight acres from the river and from the land on the far side. The streets that are left on the old core still carry the names: Colony Road, Reservation Road, Sunshine Lane.

Across the Freeway

Look east from the cottage, over the freeway, and there is a Walmart Supercenter.

It is worth knowing exactly what that is, because it is the other half of this story and most people driving to it have no idea.

The store stands on 22.65 acres at 2455 East Second Street. The owner of record is the United States of America, as trustee, and the mailing address on the assessor’s card is the Bureau of Indian Affairs Western Nevada Agency in Carson City. It is federal trust land held for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. The parcel carries no sale date and no sale price, because trust land does not convey. The building is a single storey of 184,240 square feet, put up in 2010, and the county appraises the whole thing at a little over twenty-seven million dollars.

The Colony assembled that site out of twelve industrial and commercial parcels. It removed more than six thousand tons of oil-contaminated soil, paid for a 1.3 million dollar environmental cleanup with a federal brownfields loan, and built a 5.8 million dollar floodwall and levee along the south bank of the Truckee before a single footing went in. What had been on the ground before was a radiator repair shop and a topless bar.

So the arithmetic of the last century, in two numbers: six thousand dollars for twenty acres in 1917, and a twenty-seven million dollar big-box store on twenty-two acres of the same tribe’s trust land in 2010, half a mile away, with a tribal government financing the cleanup out of its own pocket.

And the building that watched both ends of it is the stone cottage, still standing, with cars backing up to the wall.

What Is Still Not Known

Three things about this building are open, and any of them could be closed by somebody with an afternoon and the right drawer.

Who sold the ranch. Twenty acres with water rights, between Reno and Sparks, six thousand dollars, April 1917. The federal nomination does not name the seller and no later account has asked. The deed exists. So, probably, does a line in a newspaper about a rancher selling out to the government in the first weeks of the war. The papers of Lorenzo Creel, the agent who bought it, are at the University of Nevada.

Who the field matron was. The post ran from 1919 to about 1938 — close to twenty years, and for the last twelve of them she lived in this house. The nomination names the superintendents who asked for the money and the masons who laid the stone, and does not name the woman the building was built for. There will have been more than one. None of them is named anywhere this research has reached.

Whether the Christophers trained at Stewart. The stone is Stewart Vernacular and the quarry was theirs. The nomination says plainly that no documentary evidence has been found connecting the cottage to the Stewart Indian School programme. That is a gap in the record, not a denial, and the Stewart nomination of 1985 is the obvious place to look for the names.

There is a fourth, smaller one. The cottage has an address — 1995 East Second Street — that no longer appears on the county roll, because trust land is not assessed the way a house on a street is. The building is simultaneously on the National Register of Historic Places and absent from the ordinary records of the county it stands in. That is not an oversight. It is what sovereignty looks like in a filing cabinet.

Resources & Further Reading

The building record — the circa 1926 construction date, the Stewart Vernacular stonework, the rubble quoins, the jerkinhead gable roof, the two stone chimneys, the full basement and its east-side hatch, the 925 square feet and the 294 square foot rear addition, the masons James and John Christopher, the Christopher quarry on the Carson River, the Diamond Valley volcanic stone, James Jenkins’s 1925 sketch and its $4,350 estimate, the field matron programme running from 1919 to as late as 1938, the library, infirmary and meeting-place uses, the basement remembered as a temporary morgue, and the use as the tribal police station — comes from the National Register of Historic Places registration form for the Field Matron’s Cottage, reference number 03000416, prepared by Mella Rothwell Harmon of the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office and dated 31 December 2002. The building was listed on 16 May 2003. The photographs filed with the nomination are dated 16 February 2003 and show the sign reading TRIBAL POLICE DEPARTMENT and the parking bays painted CHIEF and POLICE. The same form is the source for the Act of Congress of 18 May 1916, the purchase of the twenty-acre ranch parcel with water rights for $6,000 in April 1917 by the U.S. Indian Service through Lorenzo D. Creel, the role of C. H. Asbury as special agent at Reno, the contiguous 8.38 acres bought in 1926 for $4,300, the 1920 McDowell report and its twenty outhouses at eight dollars each, the 1929 census description of the Colony’s buildings, the $100 temporary meeting building, the 1927 school in the Baptist church, and the officials L. A. Dorrington, Philip Lonergan and Frederick Snyder.

The food committee meeting at the Reno Commercial Club on 25 April 1917, its headline, and the passage on the Indian labour question naming Colonel Dorrington and Lorenzo D. Creel, are from the Nevada State Journal of Thursday 26 April 1917, page 8. The Colony’s own account of the 1917 and 1926 land purchases, the closing of the school in the early 1940s because the building was in disrepair, and the growth of its land base, is published by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. The Walmart parcel record — APN 012-301-21, 22.65 acres at 2455 East Second Street, built 2010, 184,240 square feet, owner of record the United States of America as trustee with the mailing address of the BIA Western Nevada Agency — is from the Washoe County Assessor’s parcel data, read in November 2026. The twelve assembled parcels, the $1.3 million brownfields cleanup and the $5.8 million floodwall are from published accounts of the development; the removal of more than 6,000 tons of oil-contaminated soil and the radiator shop and topless bar that preceded it were reported in the Northern Nevada Business Weekly of 28 February 2010.

On one point the published sources disagree with each other and with the nomination. A widely copied encyclopaedia entry places the cottage in Sparks and dates it to 1926 in one field and circa 1925 in another. The nomination says circa 1926, in Reno, and the nomination is the document of record.

• National Register of Historic Places — the registration form and photographs for reference 03000416 are federal records and are the only full documentation of this building.
• Reno-Sparks Indian Colony — the tribe’s own history of the Colony, its land and its government. The cottage stands on its ground and the story belongs to it.
• Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, Carson City — the campus whose stonework set the pattern this cottage follows, and the place to see the style at full scale.
• 612 Quincy Street, Reno: A Bricklayer's House and Nevada's Divorce Law — another east Reno house of the same decade, built by the man who lived in it, half a mile west of this one.
• The Glendale School: Nevada's Oldest Schoolhouse, Moved Twice — the schoolhouse that survived, a mile and a half away, while the Colony's day school fell down.
• Down to the Last: Five Truckee Meadows Ranches and How They Ended — what happened to the other irrigated acres between the two towns.
• Take Off to the East: Reno's First Airport and the Street That Still Points at It — the same flat ground east of town, put to a different use in the same years.

A note on the photograph: the image at the head of this article was taken in August 2014 by a photographer who released it into the public domain under a CC0 dedication. It shows the cottage itself, from the south-east, which is the same view the federal photographer took in February 2003. Where the record is silent — on who sold the ranch, on who the field matron was, on where the Christophers learned the work — this article says so rather than guessing.