The Asylum on Glendale: Nevada's State Hospital and the Graves Nobody Mapped

On a Saturday in April 1902 the Reno paper ran a column of short notes under the heading News of Street and Town too Brief for Headings. Between an item about the grand jury and one about the price of wool, eleven words:

Mr. Grenzfeld was buried yesterday afternoon at the asylum cemetery.

No first name. No age. No cause, no family, no service, no obituary anywhere else in the paper that week or any week after. A man died at the Nevada State Insane Asylum on Glendale Avenue, and the whole public record of his life and death is one sentence filed under too brief for headings.

He is one of about twelve hundred. Between 1882 and 1949 the state buried its dead on the hospital grounds, in a field that is now a city park, a parking lot, an apartment block and a road. Seven hundred and sixty-seven of their names are known. The rest are not. Nobody has ever found a map of who lies where.

Three Miles East of Reno

For the first eighteen years of its existence Nevada had nowhere to put people who lost their minds. The state paid to send them over the Sierra to a private asylum at Stockton, California, run by a Dr. Clark, and forgot about them. It was cheaper than building, and it had the additional convenience of putting the problem four hundred miles away.

In 1871 the Legislature created a Board of Commissioners — the Governor and the State Treasurer — and told it to build. It took another decade. The building that finally went up stood about three miles east of Reno on the road to the Truckee Meadows ranches, on ground that is now the corner of Galletti Way and Glendale Avenue, between Reno and Sparks. The architect was A. A. Cook. It was a long brick pile in the Second Empire manner with a mansard roof and wings, designed for a hundred and sixty patients, and it was badly built from the start; it needed repairs almost before it was occupied.

Around it the state laid out a farm, because an asylum was expected to feed itself. There were alfalfa fields and an orchard, vegetable gardens, cattle and pigs and chickens, a dairy, barns, a laundry, a boiler plant and a morgue. Water came out of the Truckee ditches. In time there would be an electric plant. And at the edge of the property, out past the fields, there was a burying ground.

The Train from Stockton

On Friday afternoon, June 30, 1882, at two o'clock, Nevada collected its people.

They were brought out of the Stockton asylum through the main gate, handed over by Dr. Clark's men to the Nevada authorities, and put into wagons for the two miles to the depot. There were a hundred and forty-eight of them — a hundred and seventeen men and thirty-one women. Guards were waiting on the platform. A crowd had gathered out of curiosity to watch, and the guards and the city police had to keep pushing them back to clear a way to the cars.

On the ride to the depot some of the women sang, loudly, excited by the novelty of going somewhere. The men stared at what they passed. Everyone who wrote about it afterwards remarked that the thing had been expected to go badly and had not.

The train reached Reno about five o'clock the next morning and kept rolling slowly east along the track until it drew level with the asylum building standing out in the fields. The patients were handed down into carriages there and driven in. That was Saturday, July 1, 1882, and the Nevada State Insane Asylum was open.

The superintendent was Dr. Dawson. The supervisor was a man named Martin. The matron was Mrs. Walker, with three assistants, Miss Crawford, Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Cullen, and the papers went out of their way to praise the four of them for how they managed the women on the journey.

Five days later the Reno paper printed a cheerful progress report — the worst cases were said to be pleased with the better food and lodging, everything was finding its proper grooves — and admitted in the same paragraph that there had been a case or two of violent patients getting the better of the nurses, temporarily. On the same page, two inches down, under the heading An Insane Athlete:

One of the insane patients at the Asylum yesterday showed his skill as an athlete by turning a hand spring and kicking a hole through the partition of his ward. He was promptly dressed in a straight jacket, and after that he amused himself by gnawing the window-sill.

The institution was five days old.

The First Grave

On Monday, September 25, 1882, William R. Place died of Bright's disease. He was forty-two, born in Whitefield, Lincoln County, Maine, and he had been sent to Reno from Wellington Station, out in Esmeralda County. He was the first person to die in the new asylum.

He was buried at eleven o'clock the following morning in the asylum cemetery, and his brother came and stood at the grave.

Hold onto that, because it is the last time for a very long while that anybody in the record does.

What the Attendants Said

The asylum had been open eighteen months when it faced its first public investigation. The Governor himself took the chair in Reno in December 1883, with four commissioners beside him and a secretary taking it down. The charges concerned attendants kept on who neglected their duties, and the books — who was receiving the goods, who was entering them, and where they went. The superintendent by then was Dr. Bishop, and he had counsel.

Nothing much came of it. Three and a half years later they did it again, and this time it was not about bookkeeping.

In May 1887 Governor C. C. Stevenson convened a hearing into charges preferred against Dr. Bishop by a man named William Thompson: gross cruelty toward a number of the patients, and mismanagement of the institution. So many people turned up that the hearing had to be moved into the asylum's own hall. There was a prosecution with lawyers, and witnesses were sworn, and over several days a series of young men who had worked on the wards for wages described what the job had involved.

John E. Campbell was twenty-seven, a sheep-shearer from Reno who had been an attendant three separate times. He said the superintendent kept no regular hours on the wards — sometimes six days between visits, once twenty-one, and that was at times when there were patients in his ward who needed him and he would not come. Then this:

Dr. Bishop told both Loomis and I to make Sanborn go out to work and choke him and make him work; the reason I used the means was because the doctor told me to; I was never told by any officer of the Asylum not to choke patients in order to make them work; this choking business happened several times.

Mathew Campbell was nineteen. His parents lived in Reno. He testified about a patient the staff called the German, Antoine, and about an electrical battery — a hand-cranked induction coil of the kind doctors then used for nervous complaints, two poles, a current you could make as unpleasant as you liked.

The doctor was putting the battery on another patient; Antoine made a nasty sign at the doctor; the doctor said he would give him some of it; I helped to hold Antoine when the battery was applied to him… the battery was applied twice to Antoine on this occasion; when the battery was applied the second time it was to his hand and forehead; could not say that sponges were put in the poles of the battery; one of the poles was wet… I helped to hold Antoine down; my brother helped to hold him… my brother held the pole to his forehead; the second application of the battery was applied probably a couple of minutes after the first.

Read that again for the detail about the sponges. The sponges are what you put in the poles to wet the contact and spread the current. Without them the current concentrates, and it burns. The nineteen-year-old was asked whether they were there, and he could not say.

Then they recalled a laborer named Pat Bracken, who had worked at the asylum from the day the building went up. Bracken is the one who matters most here, because of what his job had been.

Have helped to bury everyone who died at the Asylum up to last January; I have had, in a couple of cases, to roll up the coffins in gunny sacks to keep the blood from running out of the coffins into my clothes; this was caused by proper precaution not having been taken after a post mortem examination was held.

The man who dug the graves, under oath, in the asylum's own hall, with the Governor of Nevada in the chair.

Bracken had more. The state's wagon, mowing machine, rake and horses had been used to put up hay on private ranches, including the superintendent's own place out in Spanish Springs Valley. Groceries went from the asylum store out to the ranch. Patients went out with them and worked the hay under Bracken's care. There were twenty-five or thirty sheep kept on the asylum grounds until they were fat, and then sold. And in the wards, patients under his charge complained they were not getting enough to eat, and attendants asked him not to work them too hard because they were not able and were not being fed. He never raised it with the superintendent, he said, because he was afraid of being discharged. He was discharged anyway, and did not know why.

At some point in the proceedings somebody produced the battery itself and set it on the table. Dr. Dawson — the first superintendent, the man who had brought the hundred and forty-eight up from Stockton five years earlier — was called to the stand, and testified that he too had used one on patients, for nervous troubles, when the place had been his.

Utterly Groundless

In June 1887 the Board of Commissioners published its findings.

It found that the charges against Dr. Bishop were, one and all, utterly groundless. It entirely exonerated him from them and from the odium sought to be fastened upon him. Rather than censure him for any act as superintendent, it felt moved to commend him for his uniformly tender care of the unfortunate patients in his charge and for his general good management of the institution; and it wished it understood that it was not governed by any feelings of partiality.

Then it added a sentence that tells you everything about how the state intended to handle this subject for the next sixty years. Let it be understood, the Board wrote, that no repetition of any of these charges will be considered by this Board — and no other charges born of the contemptible malice and hatred of Dr. Dawson.

So that was the verdict. The gravedigger and the gunny sacks, the choking, the battery on a man's forehead: all of it the invention of the previous superintendent, nursing a grudge over his old job. The Board did not merely dismiss the charges. It forbade anyone from bringing them, or anything like them, ever again.

An Elko paper, with no stake in Reno politics, printed the report and then observed drily that while it rejoiced to learn the superintendent was uniformly tender in his care of the unfortunates committed to his charge, it was somewhat difficult to imagine the feelings of Mr. Thompson and the witnesses for the prosecution, who by this report stood branded as unmitigated liars.

Dr. Bishop kept his job. He was still running the asylum two years later.

Robert Hope, Buried Like a Dog

Robert Hope was committed to the asylum from Humboldt County on March 17, 1887 — eight weeks before the Stevenson hearing — and died there of senile gangrene on March 15, 1889, two days short of two years later. He was an old-time Humboldter and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, which is to say a Union veteran, and in Nevada in 1889 that meant something: it meant a plot, a flag, a rifle volley and a post full of men who would turn out for you.

He got none of it. Word reached Winnemucca by private letter weeks after the fact, and the paper there went off like a bomb. It ran the item under the headline A Burning Shame, and underneath that, Robert Hope Buried Like a Dog.

Bob, as he was familiarly known, was committed to the asylum some three years ago because of temporary insanity brought on by long and continued isolation from society. He had many warm friends in this county who, had they been notified of his death, would have given him a burial commemorate with his position as a citizen and a member of the G. A. R. Very likely the poor fellow died because he was not provided with sufficient clothing to cover his nudeness… An investigation should be made at Reno, and if the poor unfortunates are treated as we are informed Bob Hope was, those implicated in such treatment should be tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, and their very existence crushed in the burning depths of hell.

The Reno paper reprinted it within two days, Elko picked it up, and the asylum answered the next morning over the signature of W. L. Bechtel, the supervisor — who happened also to be Post Commander of the General O. M. Mitchell Post No. 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic, and therefore exactly the man the accusation was designed to wound.

His letter is the most detailed account of a Nevada asylum burial that exists. Hope's body, he wrote, was carefully prepared with new underwear, overshirt, stockings and a new sheet. The coffin was neatly made and painted at the asylum, lined and padded with cloth and hair, with a hair pillow for the head to rest on. He was buried in a neat grave, the coffin enclosed in an outside grave-box. And the asylum cemetery, Bechtel finished, is inclosed in a substantial fence, neatly painted.

He also took the accusation apart. Hope had been a model patient, favoured on account of his age and his helplessness. His many warm friends in Humboldt County had never, except in one instance, called on him or written a line of inquiry in two years — and that one exception had arrived so drunk he could barely recognise the man, traded hats with him for old times' sake, left him a hat much too small, and went away without giving his name. Nobody had ever told the asylum that Robert Hope was in the Grand Army, or that he had been a soldier at all.

Then Bechtel made an offer, in print, in his own name as Post Commander. Prove to me he was a comrade of the G. A. R., or even an honourably discharged soldier of the Union Army, and you need not worry about the ground he is buried in: the post will remove his remains from the asylum burying grounds to our own plot near Reno.

No one ever did. There is no record that anybody in Humboldt County produced a discharge paper, and no record that the post ever came for him. Robert Hope is still out there.

And here is the difficulty, which there is no honest way around. Two years before the hair pillow, the man who dug the graves swore he had wrapped coffins in sacking to keep the blood off his clothes. Both of those statements were made about the same burial ground, by men who worked at the same institution, inside the same decade. One of them was written to be believed by the public. The other was dragged out under oath by a prosecution that the state then declared to be liars. You can decide for yourself which one describes the ordinary case and which one describes the version shown to visitors.

Who Was Sent There

The counties sent what they could not keep. The admission books fill up with the old, the senile, the epileptic, the simply destitute — people a county had no workhouse for and no intention of paying for. The stated reasons for commitment are a social history in themselves: melancholy, dementia, chronic mania, and then the ones that are not diagnoses at all. A business failed. Bad air. Lack of food. A husband died. Fourteen children went there. Women were committed by their husbands.

And a great many of the men had come out of the mills.

This part deserves to be said plainly. The silver process Nevada invented ran on mercury. In the pan mills along the Carson and the Truckee — including the English Mill up at Auburn, twenty minutes' walk from where the asylum would later stand — men spent their working lives leaning over heated iron pans charged with quicksilver, breathing the vapour, and cleaning the amalgam out by hand. Chronic mercury poisoning produces tremor, memory loss, sleeplessness, crushing irritability, paranoia and hallucination. It was common enough in the trade that the mill hands had a word for what it did to you: they said a man had been salivated. Some proportion of the men in those wards were not mad in any sense a doctor of that era would have recognised. They were poisoned, by the industry that built the state, and the state put them in a brick building three miles east of Reno and stopped thinking about it.

Sixty-Seven Years of Burials

The asylum buried its dead on its own ground from 1882 until 1949. The institution changed names along the way — the Nevada Hospital for Mental Diseases, then the Nevada State Hospital — and it grew, with new wards and annexes going up as the population outran the building. By 1895 there were a hundred and ninety-six people living in a building meant for a hundred and sixty, and the Legislature voted fifteen thousand dollars for an eastern annex to take seventy-five more. In 1920 the state hired Frederic DeLongchamps, by then the most important architect in Nevada, to design buildings there.

Nobody ever drew a map of the graves.

That is the central fact and everything else follows from it. Seven hundred and sixty-seven names are known from the hospital's own records. Something like four hundred more burials are believed to have taken place there whose names are gone. Not all of them were patients: the ground also took hospital employees, and it served as the pauper field for the general community, which is to say that Washoe County's poor are in there too.

The graves were shallow. The coffins were plain boxes. The markers, where there were markers, were tin plates or a name written on paper and tacked to a board, and they did not last a Nevada winter, let alone fifty of them. Burials were done by the staff, with little ceremony. The last few small grave markers were stolen in the 1950s.

In 1949 the Legislature passed a bill abolishing the use of any cemetery then located on hospital grounds. It stopped new burials. It said nothing whatever about the ones already in the ground, which is the moment the field stopped being a cemetery in the eyes of the state and started being land.

What Happened to the Ground

In 1945, four years before the law, a dragline cut a trench through the burial field. It was a drainage job: the English Mill Ditch — that same British mining company's water channel, dug in 1865 and still causing trouble eighty years later — was flooding the new houses at Conductor Heights, and the answer was a thirty-six-inch pipe laid across the open ground to carry the water away. The trench went six feet wide and eight feet deep straight through the graves. It brought up bones and broken coffins, and what came up went back in as backfill.

A boy of five named Dennis Cassinelli watched the machine working from his grandmother's place on Hymer Avenue. He grew up, went into the construction business, and sixty-five years later it was his company that dug the same ground up properly.

There is no newspaper account of the 1945 trench. Not in the Reno papers, not in Sparks, not in Elko or Carson City. The graves of several hundred people were cut open by a dragline and nobody wrote it down.

In 1960 the original 1882 building, condemned in the fifties, was demolished. The same year, the name Pinion Park first appears in the Reno papers. The City of Sparks leased the land, put in a playground and picnic shelters, and families spread blankets on the grass. In 1977 a paving crew working on 21st Street came up with human remains. In 2008 a line of stones that might have outlined a grave was photographed at the site. In the summer of 2010, a thirty-six-inch water main and a road rehabilitation project on 21st Street turned up bones again — and this time there was a name attached to the outrage, and the work stopped.

The Letter at Lone Mountain

Cora Wilcox Clark was committed to the hospital in 1917 by her third husband, on the grounds, as the phrase came down, that she was hard to handle. Her family sent money for her care. At some point they were told she had vanished. The money kept being accepted. She died on February 15, 1943, and was buried in the field with everybody else, and not in the family plot.

Her son, Russell Borchert, spent years trying to find out what had become of his mother. Around 1976 he walked into the office of the Lone Mountain Cemetery in Carson City and left a letter there, in the hope that somebody, someday, would be able to tell him. He died not long afterwards.

The letter sat in that office for more than thirty years. In about 2008 a woman named Carolyn Mirich, living in Missoula, Montana, was tracing her own family through Carson City, found the letter, and worked out that she was a distant cousin of Russell Borchert's sons. She went looking for Cora Clark and found her in the tattered ground off 21st Street, along with everybody else.

What we found was that there were hundreds, possibly over a thousand of others like Cora, and that something about this cemetery was haunting, intriguing and terribly wrong.

What followed is the only part of this story that goes right. Mirich founded a friends group. Families came forward. Ground-penetrating radar went over the state's share of the land. In 2009 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 256, declaring the ground a historic cemetery and funding the work, and the Governor signed it on the twenty-ninth of May. In August 2010 Cassinelli's crew began lifting the remains they could find — the graves in one small plot east of the hospital building, and the four sets of bones that had come up under 21st Street — and reinterring them together.

On the afternoon of January 21, 2011, more than seventy-five people gathered on the ground off 21st Street, less than a mile from the Grand Sierra, and dedicated a black granite obelisk with the seven hundred and sixty-seven known names cut into bronze on its four sides. The reinterred have headstones of their own. Every one of them begins with the word UNIDENTIFIED.

One woman did go home. Annie Simmons was born in 1860 and died at the hospital in 1946, and she was Northern Paiute, from Yerington. Her remains were returned to her tribe.

Carolyn Mirich told the crowd that for many of the people buried there, her own relative included, this was the first time words had been said over their graves by hospital authorities or by clergy. And she put the thing the whole hundred and thirty years comes down to into a single sentence:

What became clear to us from the beginning was that the remains of mental patients within this cemetery were treated differently than those of our other ancestors who are buried elsewhere.

Most of them are still where they were put. The obelisk marks the ground; it does not mark the graves, because nobody knows where the graves are. There are people under the park and people under the pavement. Of 21st Street, Mirich said what there is to say: people shouldn't be driving over them, and the road never should have been there.

At a Glance: The Asylum and Its Cemetery

• Before 1882: Nevada had no asylum and paid to keep its mentally ill at a private asylum in Stockton, California. The Legislature created a building commission in 1871.
• The building: designed by A. A. Cook, about three miles east of Reno at what is now Galletti Way and Glendale Avenue, on the Reno–Sparks line. Built for a hundred and sixty patients. Condemned in the 1950s and demolished in 1960.
• Opening: a hundred and forty-eight patients — a hundred and seventeen men, thirty-one women — left Stockton by train on the afternoon of June 30, 1882 and reached the asylum at daybreak on July 1, 1882. Superintendent Dawson; Supervisor Martin; Matron Mrs. Walker.
• The farm: alfalfa, orchard, gardens, dairy, cattle, pigs and poultry, barns, laundry, boiler plant, morgue — and the burying ground. Worked into the 1960s.
• First death and first burial: William R. Place of Whitefield, Maine, aged 42, of Bright's disease, September 25, 1882; buried the next morning, his brother present.
• Investigations: a public inquiry under the Governor in December 1883, and a second under Governor C. C. Stevenson in May 1887 on charges of gross cruelty and mismanagement brought by William Thompson against Superintendent Dr. Bishop. Sworn testimony described patients choked to make them work, an electrical battery applied to a patient's forehead as punishment, and coffins wrapped in sacking after post-mortems.
• The verdict, June 1887: all charges found “utterly groundless,” Bishop exonerated and commended, and the Board forbade the charges from ever being raised again, attributing them to the malice of the first superintendent. Bishop remained in post.
• 1889: the public row over the burial of Robert Hope, a Union veteran committed from Humboldt County, produced the only detailed description of asylum burial practice on record — and an unclaimed offer by the Reno G.A.R. post to disinter and move him.
• Burials: 1882 to 1949. 767 names known; roughly 400 further burials believed. Patients, hospital employees and the county's paupers. No burial map has ever been found.
• The ground since: a drainage trench cut through the graves in 1945; Pinion Park opened over them in 1960; remains surfaced during street work in 1977 and again in 2010.
• The memorial: Senate Bill 256 of 2009 declared the ground a historic cemetery; a black granite obelisk bearing the 767 known names was dedicated on January 21, 2011. Nevada Historical Marker No. 274 stands on Galletti Way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was the Nevada Insane Asylum?

On Glendale Avenue at Galletti Way, on the boundary between Reno and Sparks, about three miles east of downtown Reno. The state hospital campus is still there, now operating as Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, alongside a veterans' facility. The 1882 building is gone; a state historical marker stands on Galletti Way.

How many people are buried in the cemetery?

Seven hundred and sixty-seven names are known from hospital records, and perhaps four hundred more burials took place whose names were never recorded or have been lost. So somewhere around twelve hundred people, give or take. No map of the burial locations has ever been found, which means that the number is firm and the geography is not.

Is the cemetery still there? Can you visit it?

Yes. The ground is off 21st Street in Sparks, and there is a fenced memorial with a granite obelisk listing the known names. It is a cemetery and should be treated as one. A good many of the graves lie outside the fence, under the park, the pavement and the road.

Why were the graves lost?

Because nobody wrote down where they were. Markers were tin plates or paper tacked to board, the last of them stolen in the 1950s, and the hospital kept no burial map. When the 1949 law ended burials there without saying anything about the existing graves, the field stopped being treated as a cemetery, and over the next sixty years a drainage trench, a park, a street and a water main went through it.

Was the asylum as bad as the stories say?

The honest answer is that the worst things anyone said about it were said at the time, under oath, by the men who worked there — and that the state investigated twice, cleared the superintendent, commended him, and forbade the subject from being raised again. Whether you take the sworn testimony or the official finding is a judgement you have to make yourself. What is not in question is the burying: shallow graves, plain boxes, no markers that lasted, no map, and no notice sent to a great many of the families.

What is the connection to the Comstock mills?

Nevada's silver was extracted with mercury, and the men who worked the pans breathed it for years. Chronic mercury poisoning causes tremor, memory loss, paranoia and hallucination, and it was common enough in the trade to have its own slang. A number of the men committed to the asylum had come out of those mills.

Conclusion

What stays with me is not the battery or the gunny sacks. It is the eleven words about Mr. Grenzfeld, filed under too brief for headings, and the fact that a Reno newspaper in 1902 could use the phrase the asylum cemetery the way it would use the name of a street — a known local place, requiring no explanation, where a certain kind of person went when he died.

Everything that happened afterwards is contained in that casualness. You do not run a dragline through a cemetery, or lease it out for a playground, or pave a street across it, unless somewhere along the line everybody agreed that the people in it did not quite count. Nobody ever decided that out loud. It simply became the practice, and then it became the ground.

There is a fence out there now, and an obelisk with seven hundred and sixty-seven names on it, and twenty-odd headstones that begin with the word UNIDENTIFIED. It took a letter left at a cemetery office by a man looking for his mother, and a stranger in Montana who found it thirty years later, to put them there. Most of the graves are still lost. The names are the only part anyone could get back.

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 Daily Appeal of Carson City, July 2, 1882 (the removal from Stockton); the Reno Evening Gazette of July 6, 1882 (the first week), of May 14, 1887 (the sworn testimony of John E. Campbell, Mathew Campbell and Pat Bracken at the Stevenson investigation), and of August 2, 2010 (the remains under 21st Street); the Daily Appeal of December 8, 1883 (the first investigation); the Nevada State Journal of September 27, 1882 (“First Death in the Asylum”), of May 18 and 19, 1889 (“A Burning Shame” and W. L. Bechtel's reply), and of April 12, 1902 (the burial of Mr. Grenzfeld); the Daily Independent of Elko, June 9, 1887 (the Board of Commissioners' report and verdict); and the Reno Gazette-Journal of January 22, 2011 (the dedication). The original of the Robert Hope item ran in the Winnemucca Silver State of May 15, 1889.

• Kim Henrick, “Prejudice to Pride: the State Hospital's Historic Cemetery”, FootPrints (Historic Reno Preservation Society), Spring 2011 — the essential modern account of the cemetery, the 1945 trench, the exhumations and the memorial.
• Nevada State Hospital, State Historical Marker No. 274 (Historical Marker Database) — the marker text and its location on Galletti Way.
• Nevada State Asylum (Asylum Projects) — founding legislation, architect, capacity, and the institution's succession of names.
• Dennis Cassinelli, “Nevada State Asylum Cemetery”, Nevada Appeal — the firsthand account of the 1940s dragline and of the 2010 exhumations, by the man who saw both.
• Nevada Historical Society — photographs, state reports and manuscripts for the hospital and its administration.
• Sparks Museum & Cultural Center — the local authority on this ground, with a research centre on Victorian Avenue.

Hero image: the Nevada State Insane Asylum seen from the south-east across its own fields, photographer unknown, about 1900. Courtesy of the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection.