The Pillars on McCarran: Eight Lives of the Flick Ranch

Driving east on McCarran Boulevard, just before the Truckee River, there are two squat concrete-block towers standing in the weeds on the south side of the road. They are capped with brick and topped with round globe lights. They hold up nothing. They are not a ruin of anything you can see, because what they belonged to is set back out of sight behind them.

They are gateposts. A photograph taken in September 1944 shows three people standing between them in good coats, with a long white house behind: a man of seventy, his wife, and their daughter. The drive they are standing on ran down to a mansion that is still there.

Behind those two pillars is about a mile of river bottom that has been, in order: a pioneer farm, a scandal in a state corruption inquiry, the first airfield in northern Nevada, a cattle ranch, an ice-cream fortune's country estate, an asset of a Lake Tahoe casino syndicate whose owner was shot dead by his partner, a proposed night club, a Catholic high school, a monastery, a refuge for Cuban children, a boys' prep school, a drug treatment centre, and a vacant lot owned by a flood district.

That is one property. Most people who drive past the pillars every day do not know there is anything behind them at all.

Glendale

Before Reno there was Glendale, and Glendale was the crossing. The emigrant road came down the Truckee Meadows and met the river here, at Stone and Gates' crossing, and a settlement grew around the toll bridge and the ford while Reno was still four years of nobody's imagination away.

George Alt came to Glendale around 1860 from Clarion County, Pennsylvania, and stayed more than forty years. In 1865 he bought a hundred and sixty acres under School Land Warrant Number Three — the third one Nevada ever issued — at five dollars an acre, eight hundred dollars for the lot. He added ten acres by the crossing, and another hundred and sixty in 1877.

He and his wife Susan grew alfalfa, potatoes, onions, beets and cabbages, ran Durham cattle, and planted an orchard of two hundred apple trees. In 1885 he put in four hundred tobacco stalks to see what would happen. He kept bees. He served three terms in the Nevada Assembly and a term as county commissioner, and the papers called him an old pioneer, which in Washoe County in 1901 was the highest thing they knew how to say about a man.

The Apples Were Windfalls

In May 1887 the Governor of Nevada convened a public investigation into the superintendent of the state asylum, three miles up the road at Glendale. The formal bill of charges ran to a list of particulars, and George Alt is named in two of them.

The asylum, it was charged, had been paying him two dollars and fifty cents a box for apples when the retail price was about a dollar twenty-five, and two dollars a box for honey when the market was about a dollar — roughly double, straight across. And the produce it was buying at those prices was no good. The apples were windfalls, the charge said, and absolutely worthless. The pickles had been left on the vines until they were ripe and yellow.

The second charge is worse:

That Dr. Bishop permitted the aforesaid George Alt to take several patients from the asylum, and said patients were compelled to labor on the ranch of said Alt, and did perform efficient and valuable service thereon, and neither the State nor the patients aforesaid received any compensation for such services. That during the time said patients were working on the ranch aforesaid, Dr. Bishop furnished them from the asylum stores clothing and tobacco, and their washing was done at the State's expense.

Committed patients were taken out of the wards to work this ground for nothing, and the state clothed them, fed them and did their laundry while they did it. An attendant testified under oath that he knew of patients who worked on George Alt's ranch. A rival orchardist from up the valley, who kept bees and had been turned away when he offered apples at a dollar twenty-five and honey at a dollar, testified that he had been told the doctor bought his honey and apples from George Alt instead.

In fairness, and it matters: the Board of Commissioners threw all of it out. It found the charges against the superintendent utterly groundless, one and all, commended him for his uniformly tender care of the unfortunate patients in his charge, and forbade anyone from ever raising the subject again. George Alt was never charged with anything and never called to answer. He went on being an old pioneer for another fourteen years. You can read what else came out at that hearing, and what the state did about it, which was nothing.

Three Strokes

George Alt had a stroke and rallied. Around the twelfth of January 1901 he had a second one, in the street in Reno, while driving. He fell out of the vehicle and the injuries made it worse, and he never came properly back to himself. He lay bedridden for two weeks, nursed by his wife and by his nephew James Carroll, and on the twenty-fifth he had a third stroke. He died at two in the afternoon on Saturday, January 26, 1901, a few months short of seventy.

Two days before he died he deeded two hundred and fifty-eight acres, with the water rights and the ditches and the easements, to Susan. One obituary says he left a wife and several grown children; the other is more precise and says a wife, a son and a daughter.

Susan died in January 1912. The ranch did not go to the son or the daughter. It went to her niece, Mamie Dickie, and her great-niece Veronica Dickie, who lived in the ranch house and ran the place until they sold it in 1918. Why a ranch with two surviving children passed sideways to a niece is not something the newspapers ever explain, and it is the one real hole in this story. The answer is in the Washoe County probate files, not in print.

The Day the Airplanes Came

Charles W. Mapes bought the ranch in 1918 — a transaction that left no mark in either Reno paper, which tells you it was a quiet deal between a prominent family and two women selling an inheritance. He was a banker and a rancher: born at Beckwourth, California in 1879, raised in Reno, right end on the undefeated Reno High football team that also fielded a boy named Pat McCarran, whose name is now on the boulevard the gateposts face. He sold cars for eighteen years, rose from teller to president of the Washoe County Bank, was vice-president of the Gray, Reid, Wright department store, and ran cattle and sheep across four Nevada counties and two California ones. He and his family lived out here on the ranch for years before they moved into town.

On Saturday, March 22, 1919, four De Havilland machines flown by Army aviators from Mather Field crossed the Sierra Nevada at fourteen thousand feet — the first aircraft ever to do it. They came down at Carson City at a quarter to eleven in the morning to a cheering town. Three of them came on to Reno by way of Virginia City that afternoon, circled the city while thousands of people stood on the rooftops and in the streets to watch, and the last machine threw in a few loop-the-loops over downtown for the crowd.

Then they landed on the Mapes ranch at Glendale, on this ground, at half past three.

Hold that against a line a reporter wrote forty-six years later, describing the monastery that by then stood on the same spot: it sat, he noted, directly under the jet pattern of the Reno airport.

The ranch had its own power house and, in March 1920, hosted a tractor demonstration that the paper advertised and told people not to miss. It was a modern operation. And on the afternoon of Saturday, May 11, 1929, it burned. The fire was first seen by ranch hands in one corner of the roof of the old ranch house and spread faster than anyone could get to it. The county fire truck came out from the central station and arrived to find the thing beyond saving. The ranch house went, and two bunkhouses, and the power house — four buildings and everything in them. The cause was never established. It was partially insured. The house had been one of the first buildings in that historic section, and the family had lived in it.

One Hundred and Ten Thousand Dollars

Charles W. Mapes died on the afternoon of Sunday, December 26, 1937, of complications from a broken leg after a long illness. He was fifty-eight. He left his widow, Gladys, and two children, Charles Junior and Gloria.

The ranch went into his estate, and on July 18, 1941, Gladys Mapes sold it as executrix for one hundred and ten thousand dollars to Margaret B. Flick and her daughter and son-in-law, Geneva and Lawrence Kimpton. A district judge confirmed the sale ten days later. The horses, sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens, machinery and equipment went with it — this was a working livestock outfit changing hands, not a parcel of dirt. The paper noted that the old ranch house south of the Glendale bridge had burned some time ago, and that the new owners planned to construct an estate there.

A note on the money, because the temptation is obvious and should be resisted. Six years after this sale, Gladys Mapes and her son opened the Mapes Hotel downtown. It went up on land at First and Virginia that the family already owned — the department store building, not the ranch. No contemporary source says the ranch paid for the hotel. What is true, and is enough, is that a hundred and ten thousand dollars of liquidated ranch capital went into Charles Mapes's estate in 1941, and that the widow and son who controlled that estate opened Nevada's tallest building in 1947.

The Ice Cream Man

Robert J. Flick was born in Ohio in 1874 and made his money in Kansas City as president of the Franklin Ice Cream Company, a regional giant that sold under the Sealtest label and was swallowed by National Dairy in 1926, which in time became Kraft. He and Margaret had been living in Beverly Hills. They came to Nevada for the reason a great many wealthy people came to Nevada in the thirties and forties: the One Sound State campaign, which advertised the fact that Nevada had no income tax, no inheritance tax and no corporate tax, and which was promoted with great energy by a Reno realtor named Norman Biltz who made a career of installing rich Californians in the Truckee Meadows.

The Flicks built the Mansion in 1941 and 1942, possibly through Biltz's own construction company. Nobody knows who the architect was. It was two storeys, U-shaped, colonial revival crossed with ranch style, with a great room, a big fireplace, a den with another fireplace, a staircase with a grandfather clock at the turn, and about six bedrooms. Over the years it grew; by 1966 it had thirty-six rooms and by 1980 it had forty-one, twenty-one of them bedrooms.

They kept buying. By 1954 the holdings ran to about a thousand acres and Flick reckoned he had put six hundred and fifty thousand dollars of improvements into the place on top of the house — a guest cottage, a packing plant, two large barns, modern corrals, rebuilt fences and ditches, a hard-surfaced road, a utility building, a pump house, and a concrete retaining wall along the Truckee to keep the river where he wanted it.

The family called it the Kimlick ranch, which is Kimpton and Flick jammed together. The Kimpton half of that name did not last long in Reno: Lawrence Kimpton and Geneva divorced in 1942, and he went on to become president of the University of Chicago.

Russian Louie

In the autumn of 1945 Flick sold the Mansion and sixteen acres around it to two men named Harry Sherwood and Joe Skoff. They were not ranchers. They were two of the three partners in Tahoe Village, a lavish casino and resort at Lake Tahoe. The third partner was a man called Lou Strauss, who was known across the country as Russian Louie.

On the morning of Saturday, September 13, 1947, Russian Louie Strauss shot Harry Sherwood at Tahoe Village with a .38. The bullet went through Sherwood's right arm above the elbow, up through his chest and a lung, and lodged against his spine. By that afternoon he was at St. Mary's in Reno, paralysed from the waist down and in serious condition, being given blood in the hope that he would be strong enough for them to take the bullet out. Strauss was picked up at the south end of Carson City a short time after the shooting and held without bail on an open charge. An eighteen-year-old girl from Reno was arrested with him; the papers never printed her name. The accounts of what happened that the two of them gave the authorities did not match.

Sherwood died. Strauss was tried for murder that autumn and acquitted. By the following spring Tahoe Village was in receivership with no gaming licence, and Russian Louie was in southern California looking for money to reopen it.

Which left the Mansion on the Truckee in the hands of a dead man's heirs and his surviving partner, who passed it along to two more men: Lou Vallin, who ran the Town House club in Reno, and C. M. Wood, said to be a partner in the Tahoe Village project.

The Night Club That Nearly Was

Vallin and Wood wanted to put a fifty-thousand-dollar night club in the Flick mansion, and in December 1947 they went to the Washoe County planning board for the variance they needed, because the ground was zoned agricultural.

This is where it gets good. R. J. Flick was himself a member of the planning board.

He turned up to the meeting and expressed, in the paper's phrase, high indignation that the thing had to be asked for at all. He had believed all along the property was commercial. He pointed out that in the early days the planning board used to meet at his house, frequently, and that after such entertainment and such a general understanding he should not now have to go through the technical channels like any other petitioner. He said he was sure the law was on his side and threatened to ignore the board altogether. A veteran member named Carl Stoddard openly advocated overriding and ignoring the zoning laws to give Vallin and Wood immediate authority to build.

The board folded. It agreed to hold a special emergency session to push the variance through with all possible speed and a minimum of opposition. Someone worked out that if the plans came in the next morning, the earliest possible approval would be Christmas Eve — and that was where the members drew their line. They said they would not leave their homes and firesides on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day to come down and grant approval. The emergency meeting was set for half past ten on the morning of December 26.

They met the day after Christmas and granted it, five votes to three. By then the proposal had been quietly rebranded: Vallin and Flick told the board the place was not to be a saloon or even a night club but a health resort, featuring horseback riding and tennis rather than liquor and carousing, and much needed by the Reno and Sparks community. Three members were unconvinced, saying Glendale Road was the wrong place for a thing of that kind and that the county could not police it out there. They were outvoted.

The horseback riding, at least, was not invented for the occasion. There were horses on the place — half a dozen of them, in white-railed paddocks laid out on the lawn in front of the house with the Virginia Range standing up behind. What Vallin was selling the board was not quite a fiction. It was the same grass and fences and animals that were already there, described with the bar left out.

In January the county commissioners granted Vallin his liquor licence for a new bar at the former Flick ranch. He had cleared every local hurdle there was.

Then, on February 5, 1948, the Nevada Tax Commission ordered Lou Vallin to appear on March 9 and show cause why his gambling licence should not be revoked. His licence at the Town House was already being withheld pending investigation. In Nevada, in 1948, that was the end of the conversation.

Nineteen days later, on February 24, 1948, Robert Flick sold the ranch to the Catholic Diocese of Reno.

Bishop Manogue

The announcement was made the night before by Bishop Thomas Gorman, and the paper led with the joke that wrote itself: instead of becoming a super night club, the big Flick ranch homestead on Glendale Road was to become a high school.

The plan was ambitious and is largely forgotten. It was to be a technical school, emphasising chemistry, physics, electronics and agriculture, open to Catholic and non-Catholic students alike, with an expected roll of four hundred, some of whom would come from outside the area and live at the school. It was reckoned it would take two hundred students off Reno's crowded public schools.

The Mansion became the first Bishop Manogue High School. The great room and the bedrooms became classrooms, a study hall and a library; the cafeteria went in the basement. It opened in September 1948 and the first class graduated in June 1950. In 1949 Boudwin Construction put up a Quonset-hut gymnasium beside the house for twenty-six thousand dollars. The school moved to a larger site in 1957.

The Brothers

In early 1958 about thirty Dominican Brothers moved into the Mansion. Within a few years they had become an independent order, the Brothers of the Holy Rosary, and the house became the monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. In 1960 they built a bell tower on the grounds — squat, concrete, capped with brick, a near twin of the two gateposts out on the road — and dedicated it to the Alt family, which is the only memorial anybody ever put up to the people who broke this ground.

In 1962 the monastery took in about fifty Cuban boys, aged twelve to fifteen. They had come out of Cuba without their parents under the operation the American press called Peter Pan, by which some fourteen thousand children were flown out of Havana and placed with the Catholic Welfare Bureau. Nevada state social workers found them foster homes after about nine months. No Reno newspaper reported it at the time, and that silence is not evidence against it: the programme was run deliberately quietly to protect the children, and receiving sites across the country went unreported as a matter of policy.

From 1964 until December 1968 the Brothers ran Glendale Academy in the Quonset hut, a prep school of about forty-two seventh and eighth grade boys, whose stated purpose was to prepare students for high school by the attainment and perfection of study habits. By the summer of 1965 they had begun admitting girls to the summer session; the paper photographed the principal, Brother Stephen, standing in front of the bell tower with Pauline Brotherton, the first girl student at the Academy.

On Christmas Eve 1966 a reporter went out to the monastery and found something closer to the end than the beginning. There were four resident brothers and four in training — down from thirty — in a thirty-six-room house, all of them from the East Coast, none of them going home. Brother Ambrose, the youngest, a student at the University of Nevada, had cut a twelve-foot Christmas tree, and the house smelled of pine. Christmas cards lined the mantel of the huge fireplace. The presents under the tree were mostly from friends of the community and mostly addressed to the brothers as a whole rather than to anyone in particular. Two Advent wreaths of pine branches, one in the chapel and one in the dining room, had been lit every evening. Five brothers were coming up from Las Vegas for dinner.

"Our philosophy is the family spirit rather than institutional," the director told him. Asked about Christmas in a commercial society, he said: "We do try to keep it moderate."

Glendale Academy closed two years later. The Brothers stayed on in the house until 1997, by which time there were almost none of them left.

The Gym Floor

The gymnasium stood immediately west of the house: a long barrel-roofed hut with a row of windows down its flank and a wide door at the end. It was the cheapest permanent building anyone could put up in 1949, and it was the only structure on the whole property ever purpose-built for anything.

From 1997 the Quonset hut and the Mansion housed an adolescent drug and alcohol treatment programme, later a treatment centre for adults, which ran until 2013. For sixteen years the great room where the Flicks took their drinks was where teenagers got sober.

And somewhere in all of that is the story people who grew up around here actually remember, which is that the gymnasium had a professional basketball floor in it — the old New Jersey Nets floor, sold off and trucked west and laid down in a Quonset hut on the Truckee.

I went looking for it and I did not find it. There is no mention in any Nevada newspaper of where that floor came from, which is not surprising: buying a used gym floor is a contractor's purchase, not a news event, and the papers would have had no reason to print it. So it stays what it is — a thing people say, unconfirmed, and entirely possible. Professional floors do get sold off and reinstalled in high schools, churches and parish halls all the time. If anyone reading this played on it, or hauled it, or knows who sold it, I would like to hear from you, because that is exactly the kind of thing that only survives in somebody's memory until someone writes it down.

Empty

In 2007 Washoe County bought the property for the Truckee River Flood Control Project, and the treatment centre stayed on as a tenant of the flood district until it closed in 2013. The Mansion has been empty ever since — the first time it has stood empty since 1942. Vandals and thieves have been through it repeatedly, taking fixtures and plumbing and wiring and wrecking floors.

A grassroots group has been trying for years to get it protected and turned into a heritage centre, and in the middle of the last decade it was waiting on a review to determine whether it is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. By March 2018 the position had hardened: a notice for a public talk on the ranch's history stated flatly that the home on it now faced demolition. A few years after that, the answer to "what's happening out there?" from the people trying to save it was: nothing that I can see; the flood project was supposed to terrace it but never got the funding.

The flood project is still coming, and it is enormous. The stretch of river between Mill Street and McCarran is the single largest investment the flood authority has made — something over forty-eight million dollars for a hundred and ten acres along the river so far, with levees, terracing and river restoration that may bring the total near a hundred million. The plan is to move the river itself, rebuild the floodplain with back channels and spawning gravel and riparian corridor, and hand the result to a parks authority. Construction on this reach is scheduled for 2027 and 2028. The district has acquired all but two of the lots it needs; businesses have been relocated and many of the buildings along the river have come down.

So I will say plainly what I know and what I do not. The gateposts are there; you can see them from McCarran. No newspaper in Nevada has reported the Mansion being demolished — I have looked through to the present, and the last time the phrase "Flick Ranch" appears in print at all is 2023, in a story about a high school football game played on the old campus seventy years ago. The flood authority's own planning documents for this reach do not mention the house, and the earthmoving they describe is still two years out. None of that is the same as the building being there this morning. If you drive past and look, you will know more than I do, and I would like you to tell me.

At a Glance: The Flick Ranch

• Where: on the Truckee River at East McCarran Boulevard, off Glendale Road and Boynton Lane, between Reno and Sparks. Two concrete-block gateposts with globe lights still stand at the entrance.
• c.1860–1918 — the Alt ranch: George Alt of Clarion County, Pennsylvania settled at Glendale and bought 160 acres in 1865 under School Land Warrant No. 3 at $5 an acre. Alfalfa, potatoes, onions, beets, cabbage, Durham cattle, a 200-tree apple orchard, bees, and 400 tobacco stalks tried in 1885. Three terms in the Assembly and one as county commissioner.
• 1887: the ranch is named in the formal charges at the Governor's investigation of the state asylum — produce bought at double market rate, apples described as worthless windfalls, and asylum patients taken out to work the land unpaid while the State clothed and fed them. All charges were dismissed and the superintendent commended.
• January 26, 1901: George Alt dies after a third stroke. The ranch passes to his wife Susan, then on her death in 1912 to her niece and great-niece, Mamie and Veronica Dickie, who sell in 1918.
• 1918–1941 — the Mapes ranch: bought by banker-rancher Charles W. Mapes. March 22, 1919: the first aeroplanes ever to cross the Sierra Nevada — Army De Havillands from Mather Field, over the mountains at 14,000 feet — land on the Mapes field at Glendale. May 11, 1929: fire destroys the ranch house, two bunkhouses and the power house.
• July 18, 1941: sold out of Charles Mapes's estate by his widow Gladys for $110,000, livestock and machinery included, to Margaret B. Flick and the Kimptons.
• 1941–45 — the Flicks: R. J. Flick, former president of the Franklin Ice Cream Company of Kansas City, drawn by the One Sound State tax campaign. The Mansion is built 1941–42; the holdings reach about 1,000 acres and $650,000 in improvements. The family calls it the Kimlick ranch.
• Autumn 1945: the Mansion and 16 acres sold to Harry Sherwood and Joe Skoff of the Tahoe Village casino. September 13, 1947: Sherwood is shot dead at Tahoe Village by his partner Lou "Russian Louie" Strauss, who is tried for murder and acquitted.
• December 26, 1947: the county planning board, in emergency session the day after Christmas, grants a variance 5–3 for a $50,000 night club — with R. J. Flick arguing for it from his own seat on the board. February 5, 1948: the Nevada Tax Commission moves against the promoter's gambling licence. February 24, 1948: the ranch is sold to the Catholic Diocese.
• 1948–57: the first Bishop Manogue High School, conceived as a technical school for 400. A Quonset-hut gymnasium is built in 1949 for $26,000.
• 1958–97: a monastery — the Brothers of the Holy Rosary. A bell tower built in 1960 is dedicated to the Alt family. 1962: about fifty Cuban boys arrive under Operation Peter Pan. 1964–68: Glendale Academy, about 42 boys, in the Quonset hut.
• 1997–2013: adolescent and then adult drug and alcohol treatment. 2007: Washoe County buys the property for the Truckee River Flood Control Project. Empty since 2013.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the two pillars on East McCarran Boulevard?

They are the gateposts of the Flick Ranch — concrete block topped with brick and round globe lights, built when the Flicks laid out their estate in the early 1940s. A photograph from September 1944 shows the family standing between them with the Mansion behind. The bell tower the monks built on the grounds in 1960 was made to match them.

Was the Flick Ranch really a monastery?

Yes. From 1958 to 1997 the Mansion was the monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, home to the Brothers of the Holy Rosary. They ran a boys' prep school in the Quonset hut from 1964 to 1968 and took in about fifty Cuban refugee children in 1962.

Did the New Jersey Nets basketball floor end up in the gym?

That is what people around Sparks and east Reno say, and no newspaper ever printed a word about it either way. Buying a used professional floor is a contractor's transaction, so the silence proves nothing. It is unconfirmed and it is entirely plausible. If you know the story firsthand, get in touch.

Who was Russian Louie?

Lou Strauss, a nationally known gambling figure and one of the three partners in the Tahoe Village casino at Lake Tahoe. In September 1947 he shot his partner Harry Sherwood, who had bought the Flick mansion two years earlier. Strauss was tried for murder and acquitted.

Is the Mansion still standing?

No Nevada newspaper has ever reported it being demolished, and the flood authority's published plans for this reach do not mention the house; the major earthmoving there is scheduled for 2027–28. It was standing, empty and badly damaged by break-ins a few years ago, and it was publicly described as facing demolition as far back as 2018. The honest answer is that the paper record says it stands and nobody has confirmed it lately. Anyone who drives past can settle it faster than any archive can.

What was there before the ranch?

Glendale — the river crossing and settlement that predated Reno. The emigrant road met the Truckee here, and there was a toll bridge and a ford and a cluster of buildings when Reno was still four years from being surveyed.

Conclusion

There is a particular kind of American property that never finds a use and keeps for it, and instead takes whatever the century hands it. This is one. In a hundred and sixty years this mile of river bottom has been farmed, implicated in a state corruption scandal, landed on by the first aeroplanes to cross the Sierra, burned, sold out of probate with the chickens included, built into an ice-cream fortune's estate, bought by casino men, shot over, zoned for a night club in an emergency meeting the day after Christmas, sold to a bishop, taught in, prayed in, used to shelter children who arrived from Havana without their parents, played basketball in, detoxed in, and finally bought by a flood district and left to the weather.

Nobody planned any of that. Each owner simply did the obvious thing with the land in front of them, and the obvious thing kept changing.

What is left is two concrete gateposts on McCarran holding up nothing, a bell tower built to match them and dedicated to a farmer who has been dead since 1901, and a long white house set back out of sight that most of the city has never seen. Drive east toward the river and look to your right. They are not hiding.

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 material drawn on here is the Reno Evening Gazette of January 26, 1901 and the Nevada State Journal of January 27, 1901 (the death of George Alt); the Nevada State Journal of May 6, 1887 and the Reno Evening Gazette of May 14, 1887 (the bill of charges and the sworn testimony at the asylum investigation); the Reno Evening Gazette of March 22, 1919 (the first flight across the Sierra and the landing at Glendale); the Nevada State Journal of March 14, 1920 (the tractor demonstration) and of May 12, 1929 (the fire); the Nevada State Journal of December 27, 1937 (the death of Charles W. Mapes); the Reno Evening Gazette of July 29, 1941 (the $110,000 probate sale); the Reno Evening Gazette of September 13, 1947 (the shooting of Harry Sherwood) and the Nevada State Journal of April 1, 1948 (Strauss acquitted); the Nevada State Journal of December 10 and December 27, 1947 (the night club variance), of February 6, 1948 (the Tax Commission) and of February 24, 1948 (the sale to the Diocese); and the Nevada State Journal of July 15, 1965 and December 24, 1966 (Glendale Academy and the monastery). Deeds, probate files and the 1918 conveyance are public records of the Washoe County Recorder.

• Joyce Cox, “Preserving Flick Ranch”, FootPrints (Historic Reno Preservation Society), Spring 2016 — the essential modern account of the property and its chain of title, and the starting point for everything above.
• The Flick Ranch Project — the grassroots effort to save the Mansion and open it as a heritage centre.
• “To Rewild the Truckee River: The Rock-McCarran Flood Project”, Sierra Nevada Ally — what is planned for this reach of the river, and the current state of the land acquisitions.
• Nevada Historical Society — photographs, maps and manuscripts for Glendale, the Truckee Meadows ranches and the Mapes family.
• Sparks Museum & Cultural Center — the local authority on this stretch of the river, with a research centre on Victorian Avenue.
• University of Nevada, Reno — Special Collections and University Archives — Washoe County ranch and family papers, and the Reno Gazette-Journal Photographs Collection, some 500,000 news negatives from 1959 to 2003.