Rewana Farms, Reno: Model Dairy's Holstein Ranch on Rewana Way

Above: the dairy and pump house at the Peter Dalton Ranch on South Virginia Street in Reno, recorded for the Historic American Buildings Survey — the low stone-walled wing under the shingle roof, built into the side of the ranch house and shaded by cottonwoods. It is not Rewana. It is the nearest surviving thing to it, in a valley where almost no dairy buildings are left standing.

There is a two and a half acre yard off Peckham Lane in Reno with a tall screen of cottonwoods around it, a metal shop building sitting back under the trees, and a fleet of tank trucks parked where you would expect a lawn.

The county has it as commercial ground, zoned for manufacturing, in a district of self-storage and airport overflow. The trees say otherwise. So does the water line on the assessor's card, which reads well — not municipal, not a meter, a well — on a property three minutes from the terminal of an international airport.

Cottonwoods that size need a hundred years and a reason. The reason, here, is that this yard was the home farm of the biggest dairy in Nevada, and the family that bought a slice of it in 1957 never left.

A Herd Name, Then a Farm Name, Then a Street

Rewana is not a word. It is not Paiute, it is not Spanish, it is not a surname, and it does not appear in a Nevada newspaper before the spring of 1923.

What it was, first, was a prefix.

Pedigree cattlemen name their animals in a particular way. The registered name carries the breeder's own tag at the front, then the bloodline behind it, so that anybody reading a herd book knows at a glance who bred the beast and what it came out of. Rewana S. V. K. P. Sunnyside. Rewana Pontiac Farms Snowball. Rewana Pontiac Ormsby Mead. Rewana Cleancy P. Pontiac Mooike.

Those are four bull calves and heifers shown at the university stock exhibition in Reno in the autumn of 1923, and all four belonged to the same two men.

The prefix became the name of their farm. The farm's name went onto the subdivision plat when the ground was cut up. The plat's name went onto the street sign. Seven decades later a woman advertising a forty-foot trailer, a self-storage operator, a landscaper and a septic contractor all give their address as Rewana Way without any particular reason to know that they are quoting a Holstein cow.

Brooks and Peckham, Dairymen

The sentence the whole thing hangs on was printed just before Christmas 1923, in a short item about a boys' calf club two counties away:

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

The arrangement described in the rest of that paragraph is worth reading twice, because it tells you what kind of operation this was. The club had struck a bargain the previous spring: as soon as ten of its members had each bought a grade heifer from Rewana, the farm would give the club a registered bull calf out of a cow with advanced registry standing in the national Holstein association. Ten boys bought their heifers. The bull went to Yerington.

That is not a dairy selling milk. That is a seedstock house seeding a county.

Nine months earlier the same firm had turned up in the paper under the heading Cows of Washoe Cited to Buyers. The county agent in Shasta County, California had written to Reno because farmers in the Anderson-Cottonwood irrigation district wanted several hundred head of good dairy cows, and the manager of a California pedigree sales company had told them to write to Brooks and Peckham. In the same column, a Lovelock man bought a bull from them for Pershing County, and a Washoe County family started an entire Holstein herd with ten high-grade heifers and a registered sire out of the Brooks and Peckham yard.

Four counties and a neighbouring state, all buying their foundation stock off one farm on the south edge of Reno.

The Twelve Thousand Dollar Bull

Both of those 1923 items name the same animal, and he was not standing in Nevada.

King Korndyke Pontiac Twentieth was a Holstein-Friesian sire who had posted the highest score in the United States the previous year for the production of his daughters. He had sold for twelve thousand dollars. In 1923 that was the price of a substantial house and most of the street it stood on.

Brooks and Peckham did not own him. What they had was his blood: the bull calf they gave to Yerington was sired by a son of him, and the bull they sold into Pershing County was his grandson. A small ranch in the Truckee Meadows was running a breeding programme off one of the best-regarded dairy pedigrees in the country and selling the results by the heifer.

The dams are named too, and they are the same class of animal. Emerald Segis Alcartra, a granddaughter of Tilly Alcartra. Burbank Sadie Beets Pietertje. Queen Toyon Boscadel Mead, which took the championship for cows at the Reno exhibition in 1923 under the ownership of Ernest Brooks.

By the state fair of 1928 the entries had stopped reading Brooks and Peckham and started reading Rewana Farms. Bull under one year, first. Cow three years or over, first. Heifer calf under one year. In every one of those classes the animal standing second was the University of Nevada's own farm.

And in the vegetable hall that same week, third prize for main crop potatoes was shared between Julius Quilici of Reno and Brooks and Peckham of Reno, which is as neat a picture of this valley's agriculture as anything written since. The dairy names and the Italian ranch names are not two lists. They are one list.

Model Dairy's Own Ranch

In the spring of 1951 a Reno paper ran a long feature on the city's older businesses, and one column of it explains what Rewana had become:

“It was in 1906 that Charles W. Brooks started in the dairy business, serving a neighborhood trade. A horse and buggy were all that he needed to carry on the delivery service. Today a fleet of trucks carries Model Dairy products over a wide territory. The Rewana Farm, southeast of Reno, established by Mr. Brooks many years ago, has a large herd of registered dairy stock, and its equipment for the processing and bottling of milk and cream is the most modern.”

Read what that is actually saying. Rewana was not a dairy that happened to be near Reno. Rewana was Model Dairy's own farm — the herd, the processing plant and the bottling works, on the ground now bounded by Peckham Lane, Kietzke and the airport.

Charles Brooks had started in 1906 with a horse and a buggy and a neighbourhood round. By 1951 the same man's business was described as the largest milk distributor in the state and the oldest dairy in Reno under continuous management, and it had outgrown its own farm: the piece goes on to say that Rewana could not meet the demand, and that dairy farms across western Nevada were shipping milk and cream in to make up the difference.

The operation was by then in the hands of his son Ernest Brooks and his son-in-law William Gadda, with Brooks himself still taking a keen interest, which is the phrase newspapers use for a founder who has not gone anywhere.

Note what has quietly happened to the name in the twenty-eight years since the calf club. In 1923 it is Brooks and Peckham. By 1928 the cattle are entered simply as Rewana Farms. By 1951 the farm is described as established by Mr. Brooks, with no second man in the sentence at all. Somewhere in between, a partnership ended. When, and on what terms, is not in any record found.

Deeds Recorded, 17 October 1957

Newspapers in this period printed the county's recorded conveyances in a daily column, a few lines each, no commentary. Between a lot in Meyer Meadow and a lot in Connolly Subdivision No. 2, on a Thursday in the middle of October 1957, sits this:

“Rewana Farms to George and Joyce Waters, part of E½, section 30, T 19 N, R 20 E, MDB&M.”

Twenty-two words, and they are the hinge of this entire piece of ground.

The township and range match the parcel exactly. George and Joyce Waters bought their two and a third acres directly off the dairy, in the autumn of 1957, while the farm was being cut into lots. The subdivision is still called Rewana on the plat. The street was named within eighteen months: the earliest appearance of the words Rewana Way anywhere in print is a classified advertisement of February 1959, offering a forty-foot trailer for rent at the same address the Waters family had just bought.

And then the record goes quiet, which is the interesting part.

There is exactly one later transaction on the parcel: a deed in August 1999 for two hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars, into a limited liability company. The assessor has flagged it with the code the county uses when the buyer and the seller are the same people in a different legal coat. It is not a sale. It is a family putting its own ground into its own company.

Sixty-nine years, one family, one piece of the old dairy. On this roll that is rare enough to be worth saying plainly: everything around it has changed hands, often for eight figures, and this has not.

What Stands There Now

The parcel map shows one address and one aggregate building. The assessor's own cards show three, which is why the map is always worth leaving for the cards.

Two houses, both 1958. One of them, fifteen hundred and sixty square feet, is carded as a conversion with two full bathrooms and no bedrooms at all — a house whose rooms were turned into an office and never turned back. The other is a plain nine hundred and sixty square foot cottage, three bedrooms, one bath, wall furnace, wood floor over a crawl space. Both are sided frame. Both went up the year after the Waters deed.

One shop, 1984. Thirty-two hundred square feet, metal frame, pre-engineered steel and glass panels, no heating or air conditioning of any kind. This is the large structure that reads as a mystery from the road, because the trees hide it and because it carries the neighbouring street number rather than the one on the gate.

Next door, on its own acre, is the oldest thing on the street: a seven hundred and forty-eight square foot house built in 1932, two bedrooms, one bath, sided frame over a wood floor. It predates the subdivision by a quarter of a century and the street name by twenty-seven years. Three hundred yards further on, another one-acre lot carries a house of 1940.

Houses that predate the plat they sit on are not accidents. They are the farm's own buildings, left where they stood while the surveyor drew lot lines around them. Whether these two were Rewana Farms buildings is not proved by anything in the public record, and this article will not claim it. But a 1932 cottage on an acre with its own well, in the middle of ground the dairy still owned in 1957, is not a suburban house that happens to be old.

The Well Under the Cottonwoods

Half a mile south of the Waters yard, where Airway Drive meets McCarran, there is a vacant lot on the corner with four big cottonwoods on it and nothing else. Stand at the kerb and look into the shade at the back of it and there is a small timber structure against the fence: four posts, a low pitched shingle roof, and a boxed wooden curb at ground level underneath.

That is a well house. Not a shed, not a pump shelter for a swimming pool — a roofed hand-dug well of the sort every small farm in this valley had, still sitting on a lot the county values as vacant land beside a six-lane arterial.

It is worth being accurate about where it is. This corner is not in the Rewana plat. It belongs to a separate and slightly older tract of one-acre lots laid out under the name Home Gardens, whose houses run from 1939 through the 1950s and whose parcels still carry the county's well code rather than a municipal water connection. Rewana to the north, Home Gardens to the south, the same flat irrigated ground between Peckham Lane and the airport, cut up at slightly different times by different hands.

The well house is the single most honest object in this whole district. Everything else here has been re-roofed, re-sided, re-zoned or replaced. That one has simply been left alone, because nobody had any reason to pull it down, and because the lot it stands on has not yet been worth building on.

The Milk Truck and the Vacuum Truck

The business that has run out of the Waters yard since at least 1991 is a vacuum tank service. The city licence under that name was issued in August 1991 and is still active; the health district licence, under the septic trade name, was renewed again in September 2026. The trucks pump septic tanks and grease interceptors.

It is tempting to read that as the indignity at the end of the story — the pedigree Holstein ground reduced to a yard full of sludge trucks. That reading is wrong, and the ground itself tells you why.

Rewana was never only cows. It was a processing and bottling plant: stainless, steam, wash water, a fleet of tank trucks going out full every morning and coming back to be cleaned. A dairy is a liquid-handling business with a herd attached. What runs there now is a liquid-handling business with a pump attached. Same acreage, same well, same trucks backed up to the same hard standing, same trees over the top of them.

The city's other end of that trade makes the point even more plainly. Reno's rendering works, north of the river on Wells Avenue, has processed animal byproduct for a century — and its advertised services today read grease interceptor pumping, used cooking oil collection, hydro jetting, pressure washing. A rendering plant and a vacuum truck yard are two ends of one trade, which is why their shopfronts look so alike. They always did. The difference is only which end of the cow you are standing at.

So the honest summary of this address is not decline. It is continuity of function through total change of use. The milk truck became the vacuum truck, and the trees never noticed.

What Is Not Settled

Four things about this ground are still open, and a reader with a library card or a long memory may be able to close any of them.

Where the word Rewana came from. It functions as a herd prefix from 1923 onward and there is no earlier Nevada appearance that survives checking. The obvious guesses — a compression of Reno and Nevada, a daughter's name, a prize cow — are guesses. No source found explains it.

Who Peckham was. A man named Art Peckham of Reno was taking firsts in the poultry division at the same 1928 state fair where Rewana Farms swept the Holsteins. That is suggestive and it is not proof, and until an obituary or a partnership record turns up, the only safe statement is that a Peckham was half of this firm in 1923.

Where the plant stood. Processing and bottling equipment described as the most modern in the state in 1951 means a building with floor drains, a boiler and a loading face. Nothing on the current parcels is carded old enough to be it. It was either demolished when the farm was subdivided, or it is hiding inside something that has since been re-skinned.

When Rewana Farms stopped. The Waters deed of October 1957 is one slice. There will be others recorded the same season, and the date the dairy gave up the ground entirely is sitting in a run of deed columns that nobody has read since they were printed.

Resources & Further Reading

The property record — the 2.37 acre parcel, the legal description reading Rewana 1 lots 1 and 2, sub map 566, section 30 township 19 north range 20 east, the three building cards of 1958, 1958 and 1984 with their square footages, construction and heat types, the manufacturing zoning, the well water code, the single 1999 conveyance into Waters Enterprises LLC at $253,720 with the county's corporation-and-individual-same sale code, and the neighbouring 1932 and 1940 houses on their own acre lots — is from the Washoe County Assessor's property records for APNs 025-265-01 and 025-265-02 and from the county parcel layer, read in November 2026. The business licences, the 1994 mobile home set-up and remodel permits and the 1989 and 1991 permits are from the City of Reno and Washoe County permit portal for the same parcel, read the same month.

The Yerington calf club agreement and the quoted sentence naming the Rewana Farms of Brooks and Peckham are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 22 December 1923, page 8. The Shasta County enquiry, the Lovelock and Washoe County sales and the $12,000 bull are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 17 March 1923, page 3, under the headline “Cows of Washoe Cited to Buyers.” The 1923 university stock exhibition results, including the Rewana-prefixed animals and the championship cow shown by Ernest Brooks, are from the Nevada State Journal of 31 October 1923, page 8. The 1928 Nevada State Fair Holstein placings, the potato prize shared with Julius Quilici, and the poultry firsts taken by Art Peckham are from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 29 October 1928, page 3. The Model Dairy passage, including the 1906 founding, the Rewana Farm description and the names of Ernest W. Brooks and William C. Gadda, is from the Reno Gazette-Journal of 28 March 1951, page 40. The recorded deed from Rewana Farms to George and Joyce Waters is from the deeds column of the Nevada State Journal of 17 October 1957, page 11. The earliest located use of the street name is a classified advertisement in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 27 February 1959, page 17. Apparent appearances of the word Rewana in Nevada papers before 1923 were checked and are optical character recognition errors, chiefly for a mining stock listed as Kewanas.

The rendering works comparison rests on the federal contractor record for the Wells Avenue operator, which classifies it under rendering and meat byproduct processing and under nonhazardous waste treatment and disposal, together with its own published service list. No corporate connection of any kind between that business and the Rewana Way operator has been found or is implied here; the resemblance is one of trade, not of ownership.

• Washoe County Assessor — the parcel and building records behind every date, dimension and construction detail in this article, and the fastest way to see how often a parcel map disagrees with the building cards beneath it.
• Historic American Buildings Survey — the federal survey that recorded the Dalton ranch dairy and pump house in Reno, and the best published record of what a Truckee Meadows dairy building actually looked like.
• Historic Reno Preservation Society — research and walking tours on the ranching ground south and east of the city, and the right place to ask whether anybody photographed the Rewana plant.
• Down to the Last: Five Truckee Meadows Ranches and How They Ended — the Quilici, Pecetti and Casazza ground, and the same prize lists these dairymen appear in.
• Brown Station: The Ranch Under South Virginia Street — the valley's oldest surviving ranch complex, two miles south of this one and still standing.
• 775 Gentry Way: The Stone House Inside Reno's Travelier Trailer Park — a mile north, the same trade in trailers on the same airport-edge ground in the same decade.
• The Pillars on McCarran: Eight Lives of the Flick Ranch — what becomes of a Truckee Meadows ranch when the arterial reaches it.

A note on what is not here: no photograph of Rewana Farms, of its bottling plant, or of Charles Brooks has been located in any collection that permits reproduction. The image at the head of this article is a different Reno dairy, identified as such. Where the record is silent — on the meaning of the name, on Peckham's given name, on where the plant stood — this article says so rather than filling the gap.