Peckham Lane, Reno: The Dairymen Behind the Name and the Acres That Held Out

Above: a stock ranch in Washoe County, Nevada, photographed in March 1940 — a weathered timber barn, a run of wooden feed troughs, and a corral full of sheep, with the hills behind. This is not Peckham Lane. It is what the ground on either side of it looked like in the decade the lane got its name into print.

Peckham Lane today is six lanes of asphalt between Kietzke and South Virginia, lined with apartment blocks, a recreation centre, and parcels that have lately changed hands for figures with seven zeros after them.

In the middle of it there are three and a third acres with a fence around them and horses standing in the open.

They are not a park. They are not a remnant the city bought and kept. They are private ground, held by one family, with a 1951 house on the front of them, and they have stayed that way through every wave of building that has broken over this valley since the war. The parcels on three sides of them sold in 2022 and 2025 for forty-seven million and forty-one and a half million dollars. These did not sell at all.

And the street they sit on is named for a dairyman almost nobody in Reno could identify.

The Name on the Street Sign

Peckham appears in the Nevada newspapers as half of a partnership, and the partnership was one of the most serious livestock operations in the state.

In March 1923 the pair are described as local dairymen, fielding an enquiry from the county agent in Shasta County, California, where farmers in an irrigation district wanted several hundred head of good dairy cows and had been told by a California pedigree sales company to write to Reno. By December of that year a boys' calf club in Yerington had taken ten heifers off them under an agreement that earned the club a registered bull calf, out of a cow with advanced registry standing in the national Holstein association.

The firm's own farm had a name, and that name is the one that matters:

“The boys' Holstein Calf Club of Yerington have secured ten heifers from the Rewana Farms of Brooks and Peckham of Reno.”

Rewana Farms became Model Dairy's home ranch, and the ground it stood on is the ground Peckham Lane runs through. By 1951 the dairy's own publicity described Rewana as a large herd of registered stock with the most modern milk and cream bottling plant in the state, southeast of Reno. The plat that cut the farm into lots in the late 1950s kept the farm's name. The lane kept the partner's.

Two cautions, because the record will not carry more weight than this.

The first is that no source found actually states that the lane was named for him. What is documented is that a Peckham was half of a dairy firm farming exactly here, that the lane appears in print by the mid-1930s, and that the valley's lanes are almost uniformly named for the families whose ground they crossed. That is strong, and it is not the same as a council minute.

The second is that his given name is not nailed down. A man named Art Peckham of Reno was taking firsts in the poultry division at the 1928 state fair, in the same prize list where Rewana Farms swept the Holstein classes. Suggestive. Not proof.

Three Acres and Some Horses

The surviving ground is three contiguous parcels on the corner of Peckham Lane and Neil Road, held by a single family trust, totalling 3.39 acres.

The front parcel, just under an acre, carries a house of 1951, a little over two thousand square feet. The second, an acre and a half, is carded as vacant. The third, another acre, is carded as vacant too. Between them they hold the fence line, the open ground and the animals.

The detail that tells you the most is a blank space. There is no sale date and no sale price on any of the three.

On a county roll, that silence has only one plausible meaning. Property changes hands; the assessor records it. When the columns are empty, the ground has not been through an arm's-length transaction recently enough for the current system to have caught it — which is to say it has been in the same hands for a very long time. The family keeps a modern house four miles east. They did not move out of the pasture. They moved out of the house and kept the pasture.

Horses on three acres inside a city are not an agricultural operation. They are a decision, renewed every year, not to take the money.

A Wedding at St. Thomas Aquinas, September 1953

The record that ties the family to this ground is not a deed. It is a wedding notice with a photograph above it — the couple cutting the cake — printed on a Saturday in September 1953.

Rose Ann Mugnaini married Richard William Capurro on Sunday the sixth of September, in St. Thomas Aquinas cathedral, in a Chantilly lace gown with long sleeves and a wide oval neckline banded with embroidered pearls. Her father gave her away. The monsignor married them, assisted by a second priest. And the caption ends with the line that matters here:

“The young couple will live on Peckham lane south of Reno after their wedding trip to the Pacific Northwest.”

The house on the front parcel is carded to 1951. The couple were to live on Peckham Lane from September 1953. Those two facts sit very comfortably together, and the obvious reading — that the house was built for the family and that the young couple went into it or beside it — is likely. It is not proved. No deed or permit has been pulled that would prove it.

Now read the rest of the wedding party, because this is the part that opens the whole valley up.

The bride's grandparents were Rosasco. The best man was Pezzi. One of the ushers was Quilici; another was the bride's brother. The groom's people were Capurro.

Mugnaini, Capurro, Rosasco, Pezzi, Quilici. Every one of those names belongs to the Italian ranching families who took up the wet ground south of Reno in the generation either side of 1900 — the same families whose men were taking potato and dairy prizes at the state fair in the 1920s in the same columns as Brooks and Peckham. This is not a coincidence of surnames. It is one community, photographed at a cathedral forty years into its tenure on the same few square miles.

Forty-Seven Million, and Forty-One and a Half

What makes the three acres remarkable is not the acres. It is the price of everything touching them.

A parcel on Nutmeg Place, immediately north, changed hands in 2022 for forty-seven million dollars. A parcel on Peckham Lane itself sold in 2025 for forty-one and a half million. In August and September of 2025 a single ownership group assembled roughly twenty-nine acres along Kietzke Lane in two transactions.

Against that, the family's ground is zoned for thirty dwellings to the acre on two parcels and mixed use on the third, and the county values two of the three as vacant land. The arithmetic of what a developer could pay for it is not difficult and does not need to be spelled out here.

This is precisely the pressure that took Bella Vista Ranch, eight miles south, at the end of 2024 — a working ranch complex with buildings dating to the nineteenth century, sold for eighty-five million dollars and demolished under five permits filed in a single morning six weeks later.

The difference between those two outcomes is not planning law, or heritage designation, or luck. Neither property had any protection at all. The difference is that one family sold and one family has not.

The Circle in the Brush

A quarter of a mile north, in the scrub between the freeway and the recreation centre, there is a worn ellipse in the ground that reads from the air like a racetrack. It is the sort of thing that starts a story, and it is worth explaining why this one does not.

Measured against the scale bar on its own aerial image, the oval is about two hundred and thirty feet across.

A half-mile horse track is roughly eight hundred and forty feet across. A quarter-mile oval is about four hundred. Two hundred and thirty feet is the size of a BMX loop, a quarter-midget circuit, or a path worn by people and bicycles taking the same line through vacant ground for twenty years.

Nor does the paperwork help. No parcel in the area carries a track, arena or raceway land use, at any point in the record. The oval does not fall on the city's park parcel at all; it sits on or beside a three and a quarter acre leftover strip in private hands, part of that same Kietzke Lane assembly of 2025.

The temptation is to reach for the Nevada Stock Farm, the thoroughbred breeding and training operation that ran on this side of town and would certainly have had a training track. The trouble is that the stock farm's documented eastern boundary is Kietzke Lane, and the oval lies east of it — and it is far too small for a training track anyway.

There is no evidence this is a historic racetrack, and the measurements argue against it. The likeliest explanation is the dullest one. Anyone can settle it in ten minutes on foot: a graded, banked or cindered surface means somebody built it, and a single-width path worn into sagebrush means bicycles. No archive will answer that question. A pair of boots will.

What a Lane Is For

The word lane on a Truckee Meadows street sign is a fossil, and it is worth knowing how to read it.

These were not streets. They were the farm roads that ran off the valley's north-south routes to serve the ranches on the wet ground, named by everyone for whoever's gate they ended at, and eventually named that way on a map because the county had to call them something. Peckham. Longley. Gentry. Moana. Huffaker. Mira Loma. The lane came first, the family name attached itself, and then the city arrived and paved the whole thing six lanes wide without changing the word.

That is why a drive down Peckham Lane is confusing. You are on an arterial, but you are following the alignment of a nineteenth and early twentieth century farm track, and every so often the arterial passes something that belongs to the older arrangement: a 1947 house on an odd-shaped lot, a 1940 cottage on an acre, a stand of cottonwoods with no building under them, a fence with horses behind it.

Those are not survivals in the sentimental sense. They are the original fabric, and the apartment blocks are the intrusion. It only looks the other way round because there is so much more of the apartment blocks.

What Is Not Settled

Peckham's given name and dates. One obituary closes this. Until it turns up, the safe statement is that a Peckham was half of a Reno dairy firm from at least 1923, and that the lane almost certainly carries that name.

Whether the lane was formally named for him. The lane is in print by the mid-1930s. Whether a county commission ever wrote down why is unknown.

When the partnership ended. In 1923 the firm is Brooks and Peckham. By 1928 the cattle are entered as Rewana Farms with no partner named. By 1951 the farm is described as having been established by Brooks alone. Something happened in between and no record found says what.

The 1951 house. Who built it, for whom, and under what permit. The county carries the year and nothing else.

The oval. Boots, not archives.

Resources & Further Reading

The property record — the three contiguous parcels totalling 3.39 acres, the 1951 house of a little over two thousand square feet on the front parcel, the vacant land use on the other two, the multi-family and mixed-use zoning, the absence of any recorded sale date or price on all three, the family's separate 1994 house four miles east, and the neighbouring 1940 and 1947 houses — is from the Washoe County Assessor's property records and the county parcel layer for straps 02035138, 02034109 and 02035139, read in November 2026. The neighbouring sales of $47,000,000 in 2022 and $41,500,000 in 2025, and the two Kietzke Lane transactions of August and September 2025 totalling roughly twenty-nine acres, are from the same parcel layer.

The description of Brooks and Peckham as local dairymen, the Shasta County enquiry and the California pedigree sales company recommendation are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 17 March 1923, page 3. The quoted sentence naming the Rewana Farms of Brooks and Peckham, and the Yerington calf club agreement, are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 22 December 1923, page 8. The 1928 Nevada State Fair Holstein placings and the poultry firsts taken by Art Peckham are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 29 October 1928, page 3. The Model Dairy description of Rewana Farm is from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 28 March 1951, page 40. The wedding, the quoted caption, the gown, the officiants and the full wedding party are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 12 September 1953, page 5, under the headline “Mugnaini-Capurro Wedding Held Sunday Afternoon At St. Thomas Aquinas.” The earliest located appearances of the street name are in the Nevada State Journal of 22 October 1935, page 8, and 10 January 1936, page 7, and the Reno Gazette-Journal of 10 January 1936, page 16.

On the oval: the measurement is taken from the scale bar on a current aerial image and is approximate. The absence of any track, arena or raceway land use in the parcel record was checked across the surrounding parcels. No historic racetrack at this location was found in any published source, and the Nevada Stock Farm connection is raised here only to be set aside.

• Washoe County Assessor — the parcel and building records behind the acreages, dates and zoning in this article, and the place to see for yourself which parcels have no sale recorded against them.
• Farm Security Administration photographs, Library of Congress — the federal documentary survey that produced the 1940 Washoe County ranch photograph at the head of this article.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society — research and walking tours on the ranching families south of the city, and the best route to anybody who remembers these lanes unpaved.
• Rewana Farms, Reno: Model Dairy's Holstein Ranch on Rewana Way — the other half of this story, half a mile east, where the dairy's own ground is still in one family's hands.
• Down to the Last: Five Truckee Meadows Ranches and How They Ended — the Quilici, Pecetti and Casazza ground, and the families in the 1953 wedding party.
• Bella Vista Ranch, Reno: A Donner Camp, Twelve Buildings, and an $85 Million Sale — what happens to this kind of ground when the family does sell.
• 775 Gentry Way: The Stone House Inside Reno's Travelier Trailer Park — another lane named for a family, and the stone house still standing in the middle of it.
• The Pillars on McCarran: Eight Lives of the Flick Ranch — the same arterial pressure on the north side of the valley.

A note on what is not here: the 1953 wedding photograph is in a newspaper archive and cannot be reproduced commercially, and no photograph of the Peckham Lane ground itself is published with this article. The image at the head of it is a different Washoe County ranch, identified as such. Where the record is silent — on Peckham's given name, on who built the 1951 house, on what wore the circle in the brush — this article says so rather than guessing.