Grantsville, Nevada: The Ore the First Company Missed

There is a photograph of Grantsville, Nevada taken in 1886, and it is worth looking at for a while. A canyon mouth in the Shoshone Range, bare hills behind, and spread across the flat a town of frame and stone buildings packed tight along a street — houses, false fronts, outbuildings, a few hundred roofs where today there is sagebrush and a collapsing mill. By the time the shutter opened the town was already most of the way dead. What you are looking at is the tail end of a camp that had been, five years earlier, one of the most promising silver properties on the Pacific Coast.

Grantsville got two separate chances, seventeen years apart, and it is the second one that matters. This is the story of a camp that was founded on a promoter's exaggeration, abandoned for a decade, resurrected by a mining superintendent who knew what he was looking at, and then run so hard that it burned through its own ore body in about four years.

Haven's Town, 1863

Ore was found in the canyon in 1863 by P. A. Haven, the same prospector whose name attaches to the discoveries at Ione, and a district was organized almost immediately. Haven laid out a townsite, and then did what town promoters did: he talked up the vein considerably beyond what it was actually producing and sold lots at fifty to five hundred dollars apiece. About fifty people settled in. Union-minded miners named the place for Ulysses S. Grant.

The district pioneers were a long way from anywhere — roughly sixty miles from Austin and a hundred from Aurora — and in 1864 they petitioned the Territorial Legislature for a county of their own. They got it. Nye County was created that year with Ione as the seat, a distinction Ione held for less than three years before the seat moved to Belmont.

Haven's claims, meanwhile, ran out about as fast as his lot sales. The ledge in the old tunnel was lost after about a hundred feet, the New York company that held it went out of existence, and the camp emptied. When the White Pine excitement broke in 1868 and every loose man in Nevada went east to Treasure Hill, whatever was left of Grantsville went with them. For roughly a decade the canyon held a few relocated claims, some desultory prospecting by Peter Lefler, Frank McMahon and Fred Hall, and not much else.

San Pedro Looks at the Ledge

In 1877 a mining man named Manuel San Pedro came into the canyon and inspected the abandoned claim. San Pedro was already known in the region — he owned the Esta Buena at Ellsworth, over in the Paradise Range, whose gray copper ore ran as high as sixteen hundred dollars a ton. Shortly after, J. B. Cooper of San Francisco arrived, and the two of them went through the property thoroughly. They liked it well enough to buy it. Cooper went back to San Francisco and incorporated it as the Alexander Silver Mining Company, with himself as president and San Pedro as superintendent.

Then they did the thing that had defeated the New York men: they drove the old tunnel farther and struck the main ore body that had been sitting just past where the first company gave up.

What followed was fast. The Alexander Company relocated and re-laid the town in September 1877 and put up a twenty-stamp mill, running by late 1878. By the end of that year Grantsville had several hundred people — contemporary accounts put the population somewhere between six hundred and a thousand — and a post office opened on February 3, 1879. The Grantsville Sun began publishing in October 1878, and the Grantsville Bonanza followed at the turn of 1881.

By the summer of 1880 the camp had the full apparatus of a Nevada boom town: ten merchandise stores, two drug stores, five restaurants, two bakeries, five saloons, two barbers, a jewelry store, two blacksmiths, two meat markets, two livery stables, a brewery, two assay offices, an express office, a bank, a foundry hauled over from Belmont, a tin shop, a brick schoolhouse seating sixty, an Odd Fellows lodge, and two miles of streets. Stages ran to Wadsworth, to Austin by way of Ione, and to Eureka by way of Belmont. Wood was cheap at three and a half dollars a cord, and good cold water came up from wells about sixty feet down — which, if you have read about Treasure City, you will recognize as an enormous advantage.

"One of the Greatest Bullion-Producing Mines on the Coast"

In July 1880 a visiting superintendent gave the Virginia City press his assessment of the Alexander, and the confidence in it is remarkable. The mine, he said, was going to be in a very short time one of the greatest bullion-producing mines on the coast, if not the greatest. It had in sight one of the largest bodies of ore he had ever seen, with millions of tons exposed by tunnels, open cuts and winzes. In one open cut the ledge had been quarried twenty-five feet deep and still looked inexhaustible.

The Alexander shaft went down twelve hundred feet, the deepest in the district, with an incline running five hundred more. The upper ores were chloride; at depth the character changed to sulphurets, and water came in. Twenty more stamps were being installed that August, making a forty-stamp mill that one account called among the most complete in the state. Thirteen other named mines worked the canyon walls alongside it — the Brooklyn, Alameda, Elizabeth, Bonanza, Lefler, Harvey, Success, Galatea, Chicago, Centennial, Cooper, Silver Crown and Cadiz — and about a hundred and forty men were employed.

The ore did not last. In November 1880, having produced something on the order of $1.25 million, the Alexander Company stopped operations. San Pedro resigned in 1881 to concentrate on his interests at Gold Park. The forty stamps that were going to be busy for years to come had been busy for a little over two.

The Roughest Camp This Side of the Railroad

Grantsville in its boom was not a gentle place. A Nye County sheriff passing through in June 1878 called it the roughest camp this side of the Union Pacific Railroad, crowded with tramps, roughs, thieves and scalawags. The jail was a tunnel driven into the hillside.

In August 1880 a man from Candelaria shot another in the camp; a near-lynching was averted only because the district attorney got the prisoner out and over to Belmont, Grantsville not being considered safe for him. The following February the camp did not hold back. The Bonanza reported that on a Friday morning around five o'clock, at the saloon of Wilson and Liston, a man named Matias Salmon shot another man, and the wound was fatal; the trouble between them was of long standing. The Austin paper added the rest a few days later: news came down on the Grantsville stage that Salmon had been hanged by a vigilance committee on Saturday night. He was twenty-nine and a native of Chihuahua. The man he killed was said to have been his fourth victim. The committee signed itself with a number — 309 — and it sent a second man a notice to leave Grantsville within twenty-four hours or he too, in the paper's phrase, would be the recipient of a neck-tie party.

It is a grim little episode, and it is also a precise snapshot of what frontier justice looked like in a camp four hours by stage from the nearest courthouse: a saloon killing, a silent committee, and a stage driver carrying the news out.

Sixty Years of Trying Again

After the Alexander shut down, Grantsville drained the way these camps always drain. About four hundred people remained in 1884; the decline was unmistakable by 1885, and by 1886 — the year of that photograph — roughly fifty.

But the mill was still standing, and there were tailings. In 1887 John Phillips and a partner named Plate, by then sole owners of the Grantsville property, converted the mill to Howard White furnaces and went to work reprocessing the Alexander and Brooklyn tailings; the Austin paper announced that Grantsville would take a new lease of life. Phillips was badly injured in the mill for his trouble. The Hornsilver Mining Company bought the Alexander property in June 1888 and worked it until 1897, when its superintendent died and the company folded. The post office held on until October 31, 1901.

And still it went on. The Webster Mines Corporation bought the mine and mill in the 1916–1918 period and again in the early 1920s, renaming the property; the mill was remodeled in 1927 and stopped the following year, and the last permanent residents are said to have left about then. A fifty-ton flotation mill ran at the Silver Palace mines in 1939 and 1940. From 1945 to 1947 the Alexander and Brooklyn Mines Company reworked the old ground for the war effort, producing around fifty thousand dollars in lead and employing sixteen to twenty men, until a fire in January 1947 destroyed the assay office and administrative buildings. Prospectors were still poking at the canyon into the 1970s and 1980s. The Huntington Library holds the company records from 1921 to 1950 — leases, sulphide-ore problems, the endless business of unwatering a shaft — which is as good a monument as a dead camp gets.

Visiting Grantsville Today

Grantsville lies in the Shoshone Range of Nye County at about seven thousand feet, a few miles south of Berlin and roughly twelve miles south of Ione. From Gabbs, take State Route 361 north a couple of miles, then State Route 844 east about sixteen miles, and turn off onto the dirt road running south into the canyon for about five miles. The road is generally passable in a two-wheel-drive vehicle in dry weather and treacherously slick when wet. Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is close by on the same route, which makes the two an easy pairing.

What stands is substantial. The Alexander mill ruin is the dominant structure and it is falling apart, so admire it from a distance rather than walking into it. There are stone and brick ruins and foundations through the canyon, the mess hall ruins, the Brooklyn shaft and its ore bin, cabins across from the mill, an adobe house, a shed with sacks of ore still rotting in it, and the brick-and-metal schoolhouse standing on the hillside. Several open shafts are fenced; others may not be. The cemetery is up the slope with its road long gone, marked now by a lone post and collapsed fencing.

Everything here is protected by federal and state law. Take photographs and leave the rest where it sits.

At a Glance: Grantsville, Nevada

• Ore was found in the canyon by P. A. Haven in 1863; the town was named for Ulysses S. Grant by Union-minded miners.
• Haven oversold the vein, the ledge was lost in the first tunnel, and the camp sat nearly empty through the decade after the 1868 White Pine rush.
• Manuel San Pedro — owner of the Esta Buena at Ellsworth — and J. B. Cooper bought the property in 1877 and incorporated it as the Alexander Silver Mining Company, striking the ore body the first tunnel had missed.
• A twenty-stamp mill was running by late 1878 and enlarged to forty stamps in 1880; the Alexander shaft reached 1,200 feet, the deepest in the district.
• Peak population was somewhere between 600 and 1,000 around 1879-80, with 40-plus businesses, a bank, two newspapers and a brick school. The post office opened February 3, 1879.
• The Alexander Company stopped work in November 1880 after producing about $1.25 million. Population fell to roughly 400 by 1884 and about 50 by 1886.
• In February 1881 a vigilance committee signing itself "309" hanged Matias Salmon for a saloon killing and ordered a second man out of camp.
• Tailings work, the Hornsilver Company, the Webster Mines Corporation and a wartime lead operation kept the canyon intermittently alive until 1947; the post office closed October 31, 1901.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Grantsville, Nevada?

In a canyon in the Shoshone Range of Nye County, a few miles south of Berlin and about twelve miles south of Ione, at roughly 7,000 feet. It is reached by dirt road running south off State Route 844, about sixteen miles east of the Route 361 junction near Gabbs.

Is it named after President Grant?

Yes. The camp was named for Ulysses S. Grant by Union-sympathizing miners in the Civil War years, when Grant was the Union's most celebrated general.

Why did such a promising mine stop so quickly?

The Alexander produced about $1.25 million in roughly three years and then halted in November 1880. The upper chloride ores gave way to sulphurets at depth and water came into the workings, and the enormous ore body that visiting experts described in 1880 did not sustain a forty-stamp mill for long.

Was there really a lynching?

Yes, and it is documented in the period press. In February 1881 a vigilance committee calling itself "309" hanged Matias Salmon, twenty-nine, for a fatal shooting at a Grantsville saloon, and warned another man to leave town within a day.

What is left to see?

A great deal: the large Alexander mill ruin, stone and brick foundations, the Brooklyn shaft and ore bin, cabins, an adobe house, the old schoolhouse on the hillside, and a cemetery up the slope. The mill is unstable and some shafts are open, so keep your distance from both.

Conclusion

The lesson of Grantsville is that the difference between a ghost town and a city is often a hundred feet of tunnel. A New York company drove into the hill in the 1860s, lost the ledge, and walked away from a fortune; fourteen years later two men who knew ore when they saw it drove a little farther and found it. What they found made a town of a thousand people in about a year, and ran out in about three. Everything after that — the tailings crews, the Webster company, the wartime lead, the men still prospecting in the 1970s — was people hoping the canyon had made the same mistake twice.

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

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Chronicling America, Library of Congress — digitized Nevada newspapers covering Grantsville from 1878.
• Nevada State Parks: Berlin-Ichthyosaur history — the Union mining district, of which Grantsville was part, and visitor information for the area.
• Huntington Library: Alexander and Brooklyn Mines Records, 1921–1950 — the surviving company papers for the later operations.
• UNLV Special Collections — photographs of the Grantsville ruins, including the schoolhouse and cabins.
• Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology — mining district reports and mineral resources for Nye County.

Hero photograph: Grantsville, Nevada, 1886. Original held by the University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections; public domain.