The Ophir Mill, Washoe Valley: The Half-Million-Dollar Works That Never Bought the Water

Above: the surviving masonry of the Ophir mill, Washoe Valley, photographed in March 2009. Photograph by Rick Cooper, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.

Two pieces of wall, standing in dry grass.

The taller one is about head height and square at the corner, laid up in grey fieldstone with a patch of red brick still showing where something hot used to sit against it. The other is twenty feet away, lower, broken at the top. Around them the valley floor is flat and pale and the fence posts run off east toward the Virginia Range. There is nothing else.

This is what is left of a building that cost half a million dollars in 1861.

It had thirty-six stamps and later twice that. It had a hundred-horsepower engine. It employed seventy-five men at first and about a hundred and sixty at its height, and to reach it the company built a bridge across a lake, on driven piles, a mile and a half long, and painted it red.

And the company that built it had not bought the water.

Three Things Called Ophir

Before anything else, a warning, because almost every account of this place is tangled and the tangle is easy to fix.

In Washoe Valley the word Ophir attaches to three separate things that are nowhere near each other.

The Ophir mill and the town of Ophir stood on the west side of Washoe Lake. That is the subject here.

Ophir Creek comes off Slide Mountain on the west side of the valley too, but it is a watercourse, not a works, and it is famous for something that happened in 1983 rather than anything that happened in the 1860s.

The Ophir Grade is the ore road on the east side of the valley, climbing the Virginia Range to Gold Hill. Opposite side of the water from the mill it fed.

And there is a fourth Ophir in Nevada that is not in Washoe County at all. Ophir, Nye County, in Ophir Canyon in the Toiyabe Range, is a different silver camp with a different history, and it is the one that carries an official Nevada state historical marker. More than one website has merged the two into a single town that never existed, giving Washoe Valley's lake and lumber trade a Nye County chronology.

Keep those four apart and the rest of this makes sense.

Why Washoe Valley

The Comstock had the silver. It did not have what you need to get silver out of rock.

Crushing and amalgamating ore takes fuel and it takes water, in quantity, continuously. Virginia City in 1860 had neither. It sat on a dry mountainside above a treeless slope, and everything that burned or flowed had to be hauled up to it.

Washoe Valley, fifteen miles west over the range, had both. Sierra timber came down the west wall of the valley in volume, and creeks ran off the mountains year round into a shallow lake on the valley floor. Sawmills and quartz mills went up all through it.

So in 1860 the Ophir Silver Mining Company, which owned one of the richest claims on the Comstock, looked at the problem and decided to build its reduction works not at the mine but on the far side of a mountain range, and to haul its ore to them.

There was a second reason, less often repeated and probably just as important. Washoe Valley sat closer than the Carson River mill district to the wagon roads over the Sierra. Machinery came in from California and bullion went out to California, and the valley was simply better placed for both.

It is a defensible decision. Everything that went wrong afterwards went wrong inside it.

The Red Bridge

The ore came down the east side of the valley on the Ophir Grade. The mill was on the west side. Between them was Washoe Lake and the marsh at its north end.

So the company built a bridge.

Not a bridge in the ordinary sense. An elevated causeway on driven piles with a plank deck, running out across the swamp and part of the open water, and by the accounts that survive it was somewhere between a mile and a mile and a half long. One eyewitness who crossed it in 1863 called it more than a mile. A retrospective account in 1871 put it at just under a mile and a half.

It was painted red.

The cost is given two ways. A contemporary account in January 1862 said seventy-five thousand dollars. The 1871 retrospective said sixty to seventy thousand. Either way it is an enormous sum for a plank road across a lake, in a territory three years old, built so that wagons would not have to go round.

Construction was supervised by Captain Dall, who appears in the record as superintendent of the Ophir works and whose middle initial changes between sources, which is a small thing but worth saying rather than smoothing over.

Picture the arrangement whole, because it is the part people forget. Ore is dug on the Comstock. It goes by ten- and sixteen-animal team down a toll grade on the east wall of the valley, in a line of wagons that one Comstock writer said ran from one to three miles long. At the bottom it turns west onto a red wooden road standing on piles above a lake, crosses the water, and arrives at a stone mill on the far shore.

That is not a mining operation. That is a piece of theatre with a balance sheet attached.

Thirty-Six Stamps, or Seventy-Two

Here the record splits, and the honest thing is to lay the splits out rather than pick a side.

The cost. A Comstock journalist writing a census of mills gave the works at five hundred thousand dollars, thirty-six stamps, a hundred-horsepower engine, and a capacity of a hundred tons a day. A traveller passing through in 1863 was told the mill and everything round it had cost a million and a half. The first figure is better sourced and describes the plant as first built; the second is a traveller writing down what he was told at the gate.

The stamps. Thirty-six at the start. The same 1863 traveller counted seventy-two stamps, in eighteen batteries, running day and night including Sundays, and a stamp count is the kind of thing a visitor can get right because he can hear it. A later gazetteer gives the sequence as thirty-six in 1861, sixty-four by 1863, seventy-two by 1866. That sequence and the eyewitness cannot both be correct, and nothing available resolves them.

The capacity. A hundred tons a day with thirty-six stamps, says the early account. Fifty tons a day with seventy-two stamps, says the later one. Twice the machinery and half the output. One of those numbers is a boast and the other is probably a measurement, and it is not certain which is which.

What is not in doubt is the scale. The works covered more than an acre. Bullion left at something like a thousand pounds of gold and silver bricks a week. Seventy-five men were on the payroll in 1862 at about four thousand dollars a month between them, and at the peak there were about a hundred and sixty.

And one thing that ought to be known and is not: nobody has established what process the mill actually used. Not the pan process, not the barrel process, not the patio. No source located names it. For the biggest reduction works in the valley, built by the richest company on the lode, the central technical fact is simply missing.

Thirty-Seven Lawsuits

Now the sentence this whole article exists for.

The company chose Washoe Valley for its water. It built a half-million-dollar reduction works there because of the creeks. And it fought thirty-seven lawsuits over water rights it had never secured.

Read that twice. The single reason for the site, the thing the whole scheme turned on, was the one thing the company did not do the paperwork for.

The valley was not empty. Mormon settlers had been there since the 1850s and had already built a flume off Ophir Creek in 1856 to carry water to ranches at the southwest end of the valley. Ranchers held land, sawmills held sites, and water in the Great Basin is a property right that has to be claimed, used and defended. Arriving with Comstock money and a hundred-horsepower engine did not create a right to the creeks.

So the mill spent its working life in court with its neighbours over the resource it had moved fifteen miles across a mountain range to use.

There is a temptation, writing about a failed industrial scheme, to find the engineering mistake. The interesting thing about Ophir is that the fatal error was not in the machinery. It was in the title search.

Prodigal Extravagance

The machinery did go wrong as well, and it went wrong repeatedly.

The standard account of this comes from a Nevada historian writing in 1947, and it is worth being precise about what she said and what she did not. She wrote that the company wasted money on unsuitable mechanical devices for milling the ore; that the machinery often failed at its job; and that when a piece of plant proved inadequate it was discarded and new machinery was built. She called the Ophir mill an early example of “prodigal extravagance,” and said the company behaved as though its treasury could not be emptied.

That is a strong charge and it is sourced. What is not sourced is the version you will sometimes read, in which the first works were a metallurgical disaster that had to be torn out wholesale and rebuilt on a different principle. No contemporary engineering account of that has been found. The phrase that gets repeated traces to a historian writing eighty years after the fact, not to anybody who inspected the plant.

So the defensible statement is this. The Ophir works were built fast and rich by a company that could afford to be wrong, and they were rebuilt in pieces as pieces failed, and a serious historian who read the company's record called that extravagance. Whether the original plant was the wrong machine for the ore is a question the surviving sources do not answer.

Hotels, Hay Yards and Gambling Saloons

A town grew at the mill, and it has a documentary spine that the mill itself lacks: the post office.

The office opened as “Washoe” on 13 November 1861. On 3 July 1862 it was renamed “Ophir,” and it ran under that name until 19 June 1871. The same month the Washoe name left the mill camp, a post office called Washoe opened at the county seat a few miles south, which looks very much like a name being handed on, though nothing states it outright.

How many people lived there depends entirely on which number you copy, and almost everybody copies the same one. “Nearly 300 by 1863” appears on half a dozen websites and in several books, and every one of them is ultimately repeating a plaque put up in 1961 which cites nothing. Other accounts give three hundred in the town and six hundred counting the timber workers in the mountains, or a peak of twelve hundred. The hardest employment figure of the lot is the earliest: seventy-five mill hands in 1862 on a payroll of about four thousand dollars a month.

What the town contained we know from a traveller who came through in 1863 and wrote it down the same week. Ophir was four miles above Washoe City, smaller than Washoe City, and it had hotels, stores, hay yards and gambling saloons.

Blacksmith shops and wagon shops opened too, and the reason is exact: the wagons coming down off the Comstock arrived broken. A grade that long with a load that heavy destroys axles and tyres and animals, and a repair trade grew at the bottom of it.

It was a rough place. The accidents that get recorded are mill accidents, people going under wagon wheels, and teamsters fighting each other.

And then there are the small sharp details that make a town real. In 1867 the postmaster was paid twenty-two dollars a year. A man named S. I. Schwartz kept a general store on Main Street. On Christmas Eve 1867 there was a grand ball and supper, and a plate cost six dollars — in a town whose postmaster made twenty-two dollars in a year.

As the milling slowed and the valley went back to cutting timber, Ophir picked up a second name. People called it Wood City.

The Railroad That Was Never Built

In January 1862, with the mill barely a year old, a man named Captain H. A. Cheever was in San Francisco raising money.

Cheever and a partner had bought the Ophir townsite. What he wanted to build was a railroad from Ophir to Virginia City, crossing the north end of Washoe Lake on piles — a second, iron version of the red bridge, running all the way over the mountains to the mines.

A map was drawn. It survives, dated 1865, showing the proposed line.

Nothing was built. The money did not come, and when a railroad finally did connect the Comstock to a milling district it ran the other way: the Virginia and Truckee reached the Carson River in 1869, and the mills that mattered after that were at Empire City, not in Washoe Valley. The V&T did eventually run through Washoe Valley, on its extension north to Reno in 1872, by which time there was nothing at Ophir for it to carry.

Those two dates, 1869 and 1872, are the commonest error in everything written about this valley. They are different lines and they did different things. The 1869 line killed Washoe Valley milling. The 1872 line ran past the corpse.

Shovelling the Grade

The usual account says the Ophir mill ceased to operate in 1866. The plaque says it. Most of the books say it. It is probably wrong, and two items from 1867 are why.

March 1867. Men were out on the Ophir Grade clearing snow by hand so that teamsters could get ore down to the Ophir and Washoe mills, which had been stalled about a month. That is not a closed mill. That is a mill whose supply line is buried and whose owners are paying men to dig it out.

August 1867. A judge brought eleven tons of ore from the Black Rock district, out near Honey Lake, to the Ophir mill, and paid a hundred and ten dollars a ton in freight to get it there.

Read the second one slowly, because it is the most interesting single fact in this story and nobody repeats it. The Ophir Company's own mill, built to crush the Ophir Company's own ore, was by 1867 taking in custom work from a district a hundred miles north, at freight rates that only make sense if the mill was sitting idle and would take anything.

So the end was not a closure in 1866. It was a long decline in which Comstock ore stopped coming, the plant stayed standing, and the company took whatever rock anyone would pay to have crushed.

When the machinery finally came out is itself disputed: one account says after the railroad reached the Carson River in 1869, another says 1872.

Two Fires in Four Weeks

The end of the bridge is better documented than the end of the mill, and it comes with a coincidence that has to be reported carefully.

By 1871 the red causeway had been sold. The buyer was John H. Dall, who ran a sixty-stamp quartz mill at Franktown, a few miles south along the same shore. He got it for less than a tenth of what it had cost to build.

On or about 23 May 1871 the bridge burned at its west end. The cause was not established.

On 19 June 1871 — twenty-seven days later — Dall's own works at Franktown burned.

And on that same date, 19 June 1871, the Ophir post office closed for good.

Three things on one man's ledger inside four weeks. It would be easy, and cheap, to write that paragraph as though it meant something. It should be said plainly instead: no source connects these events, no investigation of either fire has been found, and nothing suggests arson. Wooden structures in a dry valley burned regularly in the 1870s and two of them burning a month apart is well within chance.

But it is in the record, and somebody who gets into the 1871 county papers properly may find that the coincidence has a middle.

What Is Left, and Where

The decline is documented in short notices spread across seventy years, and they read like a time-lapse.

1871: forty-one registered voters left in Ophir. 1879: a tourist guide notes the ruins of the old mill visible between Washoe City and Franktown. 1881: Ophir City consists of one house and the mill ruins. 1952: the crumbling remnants of its large mill. 1977: photographed, ruins standing, Slide Mountain behind.

Then the freeway. Part of the site is reported to lie under the highway that now runs up the west side of the valley, and that — not flood, not vandalism — is the documented agent of loss.

Which brings us to the awkward part. The published descriptions do not agree on where the surviving masonry is. One site visit puts it on the west side of the highway. Another account puts a surviving wall on the east side, just south of the Washoe City interchange. A reprint of a 1952 article carries an editor's note locating the remains relative to a freeway that does not run through this valley at all. The roadside marker is on the east side of the old highway in a pull-out, which has itself prompted the reasonable question of why a marker for a mill on the west shore stands on the east side of the road.

So: there are walls, they are close to the highway, and the literature contradicts itself about which side. That is the honest state of it.

What there is not, and this surprises people, is official recognition. There is no Nevada state historical marker for Ophir in Washoe County — the state marker numbered for “Ophir” belongs to the Nye County town. There is no National Register listing for the mill or the townsite. No archaeological survey report of the site has been located. The only marker on the ground is a plaque put up in 1961 by a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, dedicated on the thirty-first of October that year for the town's centennial, with the dedication address given by the Governor of Nevada.

Most of what the internet says about Ophir is a paraphrase of that plaque. It cites nothing.

Part of the townsite is believed to lie on a working ranch, which is private land. The valley around it is not: there is a state park on the east shore, two county parks on the west, and the old ore road itself is public land managed for off-road vehicles, so you can drive the grade the wagons came down.

What Nobody Has Established

This is a list of real gaps, not of things that are merely hard to find. Each one is a question somebody could answer.

Who designed and built the mill. No engineer, no architect, no contractor is named in any located source. A half-million-dollar industrial plant, and the people who put it up are anonymous.

What process it used. Pan, barrel, patio — unknown. No pan count, no recovery rate, no bullion-yield figure for the works.

When the Ophir Grade was built, by whom, and under what toll franchise. The road is everywhere in the accounts and dated nowhere. The territorial session laws would carry the franchise if one was granted.

Whether the Ophir Grade and the Jumbo Grade are the same road. Two sources say yes and both trace to one author. The modern route descriptions and the land agency that manages them treat them as two separate grades crossing above Gold Hill. Unresolved.

Who owns the mill-ruins parcel now, and whether any of it is public.

Whether any period photograph of the mill is obtainable. One exists — it is reproduced in the standard 1973 history of the valley, which means an original is somewhere, most likely in a Reno collection. No rights-clear copy has surfaced.

And the one that would change the story if it came out right: whether the Comstock money that bought the big ranch at the north end of this valley was Ophir money. The rancher's own marker says the land was bought with the proceeds of the Comstock, by him and his brother. It does not name the brother or the claim. If that brother was one of the original locators of the Ophir, then the mill and the ranch are two ends of the same fortune, and nobody has written that down.

Resources & Further Reading

The company's stated reasons for siting the works in Washoe Valley, the seventy-five mill hands and roughly $4,000 monthly payroll, the thousand pounds of bullion a week, the $75,000 red causeway, and Captain H. A. Cheever's purchase of the townsite and his proposed railroad to Virginia City all come from the Silver Age of Carson City, January 1862, as reprinted in the Daily California Express of 16 January 1862. The eyewitness description of the town — four miles above Washoe City, with hotels, stores, hay yards and gambling saloons — and the count of seventy-two stamps in eighteen batteries running day and night come from the 1863 overland diary of James Pressley Yager. The $500,000 cost, the thirty-six stamps, the hundred-horsepower engine, the hundred-ton capacity and the description of wagon teams on the Ophir grade are from Dan De Quille, A History of the Comstock Silver Lode & Mines. The thirty-seven water-rights lawsuits, the 1,200 peak population and the 165 mill employees are from the Nevada State Journal of 22 October 1961. The snow being cleared from the Ophir Grade in March 1867 and the eleven tons of Black Rock ore brought to the mill at $110 a ton in August 1867 are from the Gold Hill Daily News of 18 March and 5 August 1867. The sale of the causeway to John H. Dall for less than a tenth of its cost, its burning in late May 1871, its construction on driven piles under Captain Dall's supervision, and the $60,000 to $70,000 retrospective cost are from the Daily Appeal of 25 May 1871. The $22-a-year postmaster, S. I. Schwartz's store on Main Street, the $6-a-plate Christmas Eve ball of 1867, and the nickname Wood City are from the Nevada State Journal of 1 October 1950. The “prodigal extravagance” verdict, the unsuitable mechanical devices and the machinery discarded and rebuilt are from Effie Mona Mack, Mark Twain in Nevada (1947). The post office dates — Washoe, 13 November 1861 to 3 July 1862; Ophir, 3 July 1862 to 19 June 1871 — are from James Gamett and Stanley W. Paher, Nevada Post Offices: An Illustrated History (1983). The stamp sequence of 36 in 1861, 64 by 1863 and 72 by 1866, and the 50-ton capacity, derive from Mary B. Ansari, Mines and Mills of the Comstock Region, Western Nevada (1989). The toll house at the junction with the Washoe Grade and the grade's relationship to the causeway are from Peggy Trego in the Nevada State Journal of 10 January 1952.

The population figures that circulate most widely — “nearly 300 by 1863,” “second only in size to Washoe City,” “41 registered voters in 1871” and the 1866 closing date — all descend from a single plaque erected by the Nevada Sagebrush Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1961 and dedicated on 31 October that year. The plaque cites no sources. Where this article repeats those figures it says where they come from, and where the 1867 newspaper items contradict the 1866 closing date, the newspapers are preferred.

On the matter of which Ophir is which: Nevada State Historical Marker No. 64, titled “Ophir,” stands in Nye County and describes a different silver camp in the Toiyabe Range, discovered in 1863, with a twenty-stamp mill completed in 1865. It has nothing to do with Washoe Valley. Washoe Valley's own state markers are those for the Winters Ranch, Franktown and Bowers Mansion.

• Washoe Lake State Park — Nevada State Parks' own history of the valley, the mills and the causeway across the marsh.
• Nevada State Historic Preservation Office — the Franktown marker, for John H. Dall's sixty-stamp mill a few miles down the same shore.
• Bureau of Land Management, Jumbo Grade — the public land on the east wall of the valley, where the ore roads down from the Comstock still are.
• Virginia City and the Comstock Lode: How a Silver Boomtown Built Nevada — the mountain the ore came from, and why it could not be milled where it was dug.
• Washoe City: The Town That Beat Reno in Court and Lost Anyway — the county seat four miles down the shore, and the only town in the valley bigger than Ophir.
• The Winters Mansion: Washoe Valley's White Mansion — the ranch at the north end, bought with Comstock money, where part of the Ophir townsite is thought to lie.
• Bowers Mansion: The Comstock's First Fortune in Washoe Valley — what the same silver built two miles away, and what happened to it.
• Eilley Bowers, the Washoe Seeress: The Fortune in the Glass — the valley's other great Comstock spender, and how her money ended.

A note on the photograph: the image at the head of this article was taken on 21 March 2009 by Rick Cooper and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence, which requires credit and a link to the licence and nothing else. It shows the surviving masonry at the Ophir site. No period photograph of the mill in a rights-clear collection has been found; one exists in a 1973 history of the valley, which means an original is held somewhere, and anybody who can point to it would be doing the record a favour. Where this article could not establish something — the mill's process, its builder, the date of the grade, the owner of the ground — it says so rather than filling the gap.