Quartz Mountain, Nevada: The Lodi Hills Silver-Lead Camp Beside Broken Hills

Drive State Route 361 south toward Gabbs and the Lodi Hills come up low and pale on the horizon, treeless and the color of old bone. Tucked into them, two miles east of the worn-out camp at Broken Hills, is Quartz Mountain — a Nye County silver-lead town that went from bare slope to platted streets, with a newspaper, an airstrip, and four cafes, in a single roaring year. That year was 1926. By the end of the decade it was finished. What the desert kept is a tall timber headframe over the San Rafael shaft, a litter of collapsed buildings, and more weathered lumber than almost any ghost camp in this corner of the state.

These high-desert camps leave more rumor than record, and Quartz Mountain is thin even by that standard: one surviving photograph, a handful of mining-bureau notes, a few lines in the old county papers. We have set down the story the ground and the records support, and where the desert swallowed a detail we have let the gap stand rather than invent around it. One thing worth settling at the door — this is not the Quartz Mountain out by Goldfield. This is the Lodi Hills camp, Broken Hills' near neighbor.

The Camp and the Lodi District

The Lodi Hills are a modest range in the northwest corner of Nye County, rising to about 6,500 feet, with State Route 361 tracing their western foot. Quartz Mountain sat among them inside the old Lodi Mining District, some thirty-five miles out from the rail siding at Luning and close enough to the Mineral County line that both counties can lay a claim to it — a fair way to picture a town pressed right up against the boundary.

That boundary is really the Broken Hills story, and the two camps lived and died as a pair. Broken Hills had been picked at since 1913, but its first operators skimmed the best of the shallow ore early, and it never truly boomed; its post office closed in 1921 and the place went still. Quartz Mountain woke it back up. When the San Rafael ore began making news in 1926, Broken Hills reopened its post office and caught a second wind off its neighbor's rush. Both camps ran on the same hard arithmetic of the Nevada silver country — rich rock, no water, no smelter within reach — and Broken Hills hauled its water a full ten miles up from Lodi Valley. For a camp that met the same odds and simply refused to die, read our story on Ione.

The Strike and the Mines

Prospectors had scratched at this slope for years before anyone made it pay. A wanderer named Obie Lefavor worked the ground as early as 1908 and gave it up. A Luning man, B. M. Clay, uncovered a rich ledge of silver-lead ore here around 1920 and shipped the first cars the next year. Then the hill went quiet again until the mid-1920s, when a far richer vein came to light and set the whole district alight.

The mine at the center of it was the San Rafael. Down on its 350-foot level the ore ran thirty percent lead and thirty ounces of silver to the ton, and it came out two fifty-ton carloads a week — high-grade by any measure, the kind of number that travels. Travel it did. Word of the strike, and a rumor that the Reno banker George Wingfield had taken an interest in the claims, pulled prospectors in from as far as the Idaho panhandle and down into Mexico. Whether Wingfield ever sank a dollar into the ground is anyone's guess, and that part belongs to the camp's legend as much as its ledger — but the rumor alone was worth a hundred new arrivals.

In June 1926 the slope became a town almost overnight. A townsite company laid out streets and sold off better than four hundred lots, a landing strip was scraped flat for the airplanes, and in the first week six finished buildings were dragged in whole from Rawhide — one dead camp furnishing the next, the way they all did out here. A paper called the Quartz Mountain Miner started up that same month and promptly announced that the district would be “a second Coeur d'Alene.” A small mill went up. More than fifteen companies were working the hills before it was over, and the better claims folded into outfits like the San Rafael Consolidated.

The ore was never the problem. The freight was. With no smelter within reach, every ton had to be trucked out for processing, and the charges ate the profit alive — enough that a genuinely rich mine could still run at a loss. The crowd thinned almost as fast as it had gathered, well before the 1929 crash reached Wall Street. The post office opened in 1927 and closed in January 1929, which is about as long as a town like this ever had. A few stubborn men kept at the San Rafael for decades afterward — still shipping a carload or two a month in 1940, still eight of them underground as late as 1950 — but the boom was a single year, and 1926 was it.

The People of the Camp

Nobody really knows how many people stood on that slope at the peak. The best reckoning puts close to five hundred of them gathered at the foot of the mountain within months of the strike, packed onto those four hundred-odd lots — and yet the census that caught the camp in 1930 counted ten. Both can be true. A boom town is a city of tents and tar-paper that no enumerator ever reaches in time; by the year the government came to count, the crowd had already loaded its wagons and gone.

The few names that survive are the prospectors Lefavor and Clay, and the townsite man who platted the streets. The rest are anonymous — the miners who came up from Mexico and down from Idaho, the grocers and barbers and the keepers of those four cafes, the crew that muscled six buildings across the desert from Rawhide in a week. A single photograph of the camp, taken in 1926, is very nearly all that is left of their daily life. It is a thin inheritance for a place that once meant to rival the mining districts of Idaho.

What Remains Today

Quartz Mountain is a ghost town you can actually see, which is more than many can say. The San Rafael headframe still stands over its shaft, tall enough to read across the valley from miles off, with the Calico shaft and the broken works of the Hasbrouck and Kernick mines scattered nearby. Around them lie flattened buildings, stone foundations, and that remarkable drift of silvered lumber — the bones of a town that was mostly hauled in secondhand to begin with. A small monument sits above the camp. Desert sites change with every storm and every scrapper, so take this as the picture recent visitors have carried back, not a promise of what you will find.

There is one strange grace note to the place. In the spring of 1935 an iron meteorite turned up about five miles out and went off to the state laboratory to be identified — the sky adding its own odd deposit to a district that had already given up most of its silver.

A word of caution, as with everything we write about the back country. Open shafts and rotten timber are genuinely dangerous, land status shifts from claim to claim, and the roads are long and lonely. We offer this as history to read, not an itinerary. If you do go into these hills, go prepared, go with someone, stay well clear of the workings, and leave what you find exactly where it lies.

At a Glance: Quartz Mountain, Nevada

• A silver-lead ghost town in the Lodi Hills of northwest Nye County, about two miles east of Broken Hills and the Mineral County line.
• Silver-lead ore was found here around 1920, but the camp did not truly take off until a richer vein was struck in the mid-1920s.
• The San Rafael was the great mine — ore running thirty percent lead and thirty ounces of silver to the ton off its 350-foot level.
• The boom was 1926: a platted townsite, a landing strip, a newspaper, four cafes, six buildings hauled whole from Rawhide, and more than fifteen companies at work.
• The post office ran from 1927 to January 1929. Heavy freight costs, not played-out ore, broke the town, though a few men mined on into the 1950s.
• The strike next door revived Broken Hills, which reopened its post office in June 1926.
• What stands today: the San Rafael headframe, scattered foundations, and a great deal of weathered lumber.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Quartz Mountain, Nevada?

In the Lodi Hills of northwest Nye County, in the high desert near Gabbs and about two miles east of Broken Hills. You reach it off US 50 and then south on State Route 361.

What was mined at Quartz Mountain?

Silver and lead, chiefly from the San Rafael mine. A small mill ran here briefly, but high freight costs meant most of the ore left by truck for processing elsewhere.

How is Quartz Mountain related to Broken Hills?

They are neighbors a couple of miles apart, on opposite sides of the Nye–Mineral county line. Broken Hills had faded by the early 1920s, and Quartz Mountain's rush gave it a second life.

Is this the same as the Quartz Mountain near Goldfield?

No. There is a separate Quartz Mountain district east of Goldfield, and another prospect by that name elsewhere in Nye County. The camp described here is the silver-lead town in the Lodi Hills beside Broken Hills.

Conclusion

Quartz Mountain has a very Nevada shape to it: a promising ledge, a whisper of big money, a town conjured in a week out of other towns' lumber, and a freight bill no grade of ore could ever cover. It lasted about as long as a year's newspaper subscription. The headframe, a few foundations, and the stubborn richness of the San Rafael's vein are what the high desert chose to keep.

We keep coming back to the Nevada back country at The Eclection, from the silver camp at Aurora to these neighbors in the Lodi Hills. 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:

• Online Nevada Encyclopedia — articles on Nevada history, people, and places.
• Nevada Historical Society — the state museum and research library for Nevada history.
• Nevada State Historic Preservation Office — Nevada's historic places, state historical markers, and preservation guidance.

Hero photograph: State Route 361 between Luning and Gabbs, Nevada, by Ken Lund, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.