Washoe City: The Town That Beat Reno in Court and Lost Anyway

On the night of Monday, June 19, 1871, the Washoe Valley Reduction Works at Franktown burned to the ground. The fire started on the roof, where no spark was likely to have reached it, and by the time anyone saw it the building was gone. Somebody had tried to burn the same premises a few weeks earlier. Somebody had already set fire to the owner's bridge. The mill was worth a hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and fifty men lost their work in a night.

Two days later, on Wednesday the 21st, the records of Washoe County were loaded up and hauled out of Washoe City to Reno. The following morning, for the first time, court was held in Reno.

A man sitting in Washoe City that week wrote a letter to a Carson City paper. He began it: "Disasters seldom come singly."

The Town That Milled the Comstock

Washoe City was never meant to be beautiful and was never meant to last. It was a machine for processing the Comstock, and it was put where it was because of water.

When Washoe County was created in 1861, Washoe City was made the seat of justice and was already the largest town in it. The creeks coming off the Sierra and the lake below them gave it the two things a mill town needs: power to turn the stamps and water to run the pans. Quartz mills went up along the creeks and sawmills went up beside them, and the whole output of both went in one direction — up the grade to Virginia City.

The traffic was the thing. Mule teams by the dozen hauled lumber and hay and provisions up the mountain and came back down loaded with ore to be milled in the valley. At its height, somewhere around 1865 to 1867, the town is usually credited with six thousand people, though that is an estimate made long afterwards and a good many of them were transient. There were the Atchison mill and the New York, the Buckeye and the Minnesota, and the Ophir, whose remains are still out there in the sage.

In 1863 the county let a contract for a courthouse at fifteen thousand dollars, and another for a jail at three thousand seven hundred and forty. The jail is still standing. It is the last building of the business district left.

The Railroad Changed the Arithmetic

Washoe City existed because ore had to come down off the Comstock to water. Everything it was rested on that one fact, and in 1869 the fact stopped being true.

The Virginia and Truckee Railroad was completed from Virginia City down to the Carson River, and the mills at Empire City could suddenly take Comstock ore more cheaply than anybody in Washoe Valley could. There was no longer any reason to drag rock over a mountain to a lake when a train would take it down a canyon to a river. The mule teams stopped. Milling and lumbering in the valley had already been slowing since the middle of the decade; the railroad finished it.

By December 1868 the town was described as nearly deserted. By 1880 there were about two hundred people left. Everything that happens next is a fight over the remains.

Seven Hundred and Sixty-Five Signatures

In the summer of 1868, within weeks of the railroad auctioning the first lots at Lake's Crossing and calling the place Reno, a petition began circulating in the north end of the county. It asked the commissioners to call an election on where the county seat ought to be. It was, in the words of the man who watched it happen, "very generally signed by the people of that section" — seven hundred and sixty-five names.

The commissioners denied it.

Reno did not go away. The petition sat for a year and a half, and in the spring of 1870 it was presented again. This time the board ordered an election, to be held on the fourteenth of June.

Washoe City Wins

This is the part everybody gets wrong, including most of what has been written about the town since.

Before the election was held, citizens of Washoe City went into the District Court and asked for a writ of certiorari — a review of whether the commissioners had any business ordering the vote at all. The District Court threw them out. The election went ahead on June 14, 1870, and Reno won it: five hundred and forty-four votes to three hundred and sixty-two.

And then Washoe City appealed, and at its July term the Supreme Court of Nevada reversed the court below and ordered it to annul the whole proceeding.

Washoe City won. The election was void. Reno had taken the county seat at the ballot box and the Supreme Court had taken it back off them within a month.

So Reno Went to the Legislature

If you cannot win a vote, buy a statute.

At the next session, in 1871, the Nevada Legislature simply passed an Act moving the county seat of Washoe County to Reno, effective the first Monday of April. No election, no petition, no commissioners. The legislature of the state reached down and moved it.

Washoe City went back to court one more time. Before the April date a citizen named Lewis Hess applied for an injunction against the sheriff and the other county officers to stop them taking the offices out of town, and the District Court granted it. The county officers, headed by C. W. Pegg, appealed at once.

On May 2, 1871, the Supreme Court filed its decision. It reversed the injunction and sent the case back with instructions to dismiss, holding the Act of the Legislature constitutional. The opinion was written by Judge Whitman, with Chief Justice Lewis concurring — and Judge Garber dissenting. The court that finally handed Reno the county seat was not unanimous about it.

The Carson paper reported the decision in two sentences and then could not help itself:

This will promote the security of Brother Balcom's dam, as the Renonians will use up most of their giant powder in celebrating the removal of the county records.

Washoe City filed for a rehearing, which stayed everything. And then the thing that actually delayed the end of the town for seven weeks: the justices of the Supreme Court of Nevada scattered. They "flitted to the East and the West," as the Washoe City correspondent put it, "and did not come together again until yesterday." Yesterday was June 19, 1871 — the same day somebody climbed onto the roof of Dall's mill.

The Week It Ended

So the end of Washoe City happened in four days, and they are worth taking one at a time.

Monday, June 19. The Supreme Court reconvened in Carson City and denied the rehearing. That same night, twenty-odd miles north, the Washoe Valley Reduction Works at Franktown caught fire on its roof. John H. Dall's mill was the largest industrial plant left in the valley. It was gone before anyone could get water to it.

The man who wrote the letter was clear about what he thought of it. The fire was first seen burning on the roof, where no spark was likely to have landed. Somebody had tried to burn the same premises a few weeks before. Somebody had already set fire to Dall's bridge at Ophir and partly destroyed it. He used the word plainly: incendiary. The mill was put at a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and insured for eighty. About fifty men lost their work, many of them with families.

Nobody was ever named for it, as far as the record goes.

Tuesday, June 20. The news of the denied rehearing reached Washoe City, and a resident sat down and wrote the letter that opens this article. It is the single best document on the whole fight, because it was written by somebody who had lived through all three years of it and who knew, as he wrote, that he had lost. He walks the reader through the petition, the denial, the election, the certiorari, the reversal, the Act, the injunction, the appeal, the rehearing and the scattered judges, in order, in about four hundred words, and gets every stage right. Then he turns to the mill.

Wednesday, June 21. The records of Washoe County were loaded and hauled to Reno. Deed books, probate files, the whole paper history of the county since 1861, out the door and down the valley.

Thursday, June 22. Court was held in Reno for the first time.

Both halves of what a town of that kind was built on — the mill that paid the wages and the courthouse that brought the business — were taken out of Washoe City inside seventy-two hours. One by fire and one by writ.

What Happened to the Courthouse

The usual account has the courthouse pulled down in April 1873, two years after it was emptied, and the bricks carted off to Carson City to be used in something else.

The first half is probably right. The second half I cannot find a source for anywhere, and I looked. There is a persistent, pleasing story that the bricks of the Washoe County courthouse are standing today in a Carson City building, and nothing I can put my hands on supports it. Treat it as a story until somebody produces the invoice.

What is certain is that a fifteen-thousand-dollar courthouse, finished in 1863, served as the seat of justice of Washoe County for eight years and then was worth more as salvage than as a building.

What's Left

Drive Old Washoe City Road today and there is very little to tell you that six thousand people are supposed to have lived here.

The jail is still standing — the three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-dollar contract of 1863, and the last building of the business district. It is on private ground now, within Washoe Zephyr Gardens, and it is the one piece of the county seat that outlived the county seat.

The cemetery is the most affecting thing in the valley. A good many of the graves are marked by nothing but a circle of rocks laid on the ground, which is what you do when there is no money and no stonecutter and somebody has to be buried this week. Ownership of the ground has never been fully resolved, which is its own kind of comment.

Out in the sage there are the remains of the Ophir mill, which ran from 1861 to 1866 and was the biggest of them. Up the valley, the Winters Ranch — Rancho del Sierra — is on the National Register, and so is Bowers Mansion, which was built with Comstock money in the years when Washoe City was the place you went to do business.

Two cautions, because both of these circulate as fact. The log cabin that stood near the old Cattleman's Restaurant is not a pioneer building; it is a twentieth-century movie set, and it gets photographed as the real thing constantly. And Washoe City has no Nevada state historical marker. The plaque on the ground was put up on the sixth of August, 2017, by the Snowshoe Thompson Chapter 1827 of E Clampus Vitus, on private property. It is a good plaque. It is not a state marker, and the difference matters if you are trying to work out what has actually been officially recognised in this valley.

The answer is: almost nothing. The largest town in Washoe County, its first county seat, the place the entire Comstock's ore came down the mountain to be crushed, has a jail on private land, a cemetery nobody will claim, and a fraternal plaque.

At a Glance: Washoe City

• What: a mill and lumber town in Washoe Valley, and the first county seat of Washoe County.
• When: county created 1861, with Washoe City as the seat of justice and already the largest town in it. Courthouse contracted 1863 at $15,000; jail the same year at $3,740.
• Why it existed: water. Sierra creeks gave the power to run the stamps and the water to run the pans, so Comstock ore was hauled down the mountain to Washoe Valley to be milled. Mills included the Atchison, New York, Buckeye, Minnesota and Ophir.
• How big: usually credited with about 6,000 people around 1865–67 — an estimate made long afterwards, with no census behind it. About 200 by 1880.
• What killed it: the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, completed in 1869, which let Comstock ore go down the canyon to the mills on the Carson River at Empire City instead. The reason to haul rock over a mountain simply stopped existing. The town was described as nearly deserted by December 1868.
• The county-seat fight: a petition of 765 signatures in the summer of 1868, denied; presented again in spring 1870 and granted; election 14 June 1870, Reno 544, Washoe City 362.
• And then Washoe City won. At its July 1870 term the Supreme Court of Nevada reversed the District Court and ordered the whole election annulled — State ex rel Hess and Beck vs. Smith et al. The vote was void.
• So Reno went to the Legislature. The 1871 session passed an Act moving the county seat to Reno effective the first Monday of April. No election, no petition.
• The last suit: C. W. Pegg et al. v. Lewis Hess. Decision filed 2 May 1871, reversing an injunction and holding the Act constitutional. Opinion by Judge Whitman, Chief Justice Lewis concurring, Judge Garber dissenting. The court was not unanimous.
• What delayed the end seven weeks: a petition for rehearing stayed the remittitur, and the justices scattered east and west and did not reconvene until 19 June 1871.
• The same night: Dall's mill at Franktown burned — the Washoe Valley Reduction Works, worth $120,000–$130,000, insured for $80,000, fifty men out of work, the fire first seen on the roof and believed set.
• The records left Washoe City on Wednesday 21 June 1871. Reno held court for the first time on the 22nd.
• What survives: the 1863 jail, last building of the business district, on private ground; the Washoe City Cemetery, with many graves marked only by circles of rock; remains of the Ophir mill; nearby, Winters Ranch (National Register, Marker 94) and Bowers Mansion (National Register, Marker 166).
• Two things to get right: the log cabin near the old Cattleman's Restaurant is a twentieth-century movie set, not a pioneer cabin. And Washoe City has no Nevada state historical marker — the plaque on the ground is an E Clampus Vitus plaque erected in 2017, on private property.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Reno win the county seat in an election?

No, and this is the single most common error about the whole affair. Reno won the vote of 14 June 1870 by 544 to 362, but the Supreme Court of Nevada annulled that election the following month. Reno got the county seat eleven months later by an Act of the 1871 Legislature, and then had to defend the Act all the way back up to the Supreme Court against an injunction. The ballot box result was a dead letter.

Where was Washoe City?

In Washoe Valley, between Reno and Carson City on the east side of the lake, along what is now Old Washoe City Road off Eastlake Boulevard. The settlement called New Washoe City is a separate, later, residential development slightly to the south; the original townsite is the one with the jail and the cemetery.

Can you visit anything?

The cemetery is accessible and worth the time. The 1863 jail survives but stands on private property, as does the E Clampus Vitus plaque, so admire both from the road. Bowers Mansion, a few minutes up the valley, is a county park and open to the public, and is the best way to stand inside the money that Washoe City's mills were crushing.

How many people really lived there?

Nobody knows. The figure of six thousand is an estimate made in the twentieth century, not a count, and a great many of the people in a mill-and-freight town were transient by definition. The town's peak fell squarely between the 1860 and 1870 federal censuses, which is precisely the worst possible timing, and by 1870 the collapse had already happened.

Was the mill fire connected to the county seat?

There is no evidence that it was, and the obvious motive runs the wrong way — burning the valley's largest employer does not help anybody keep a courthouse. The correspondent who reported both in the same letter clearly suspected arson of the mill, and noted that the same premises and the owner's bridge had been fired before, which points at a quarrel with John H. Dall rather than at Reno. The two events share a week and nothing more. It is a coincidence, and an unusually cruel one.

What is left of the courthouse?

Nothing above ground. It is generally said to have been demolished in April 1873. The widely repeated detail that its bricks were hauled to Carson City and reused there is not something I can source, and until somebody can, it should be treated as a story rather than a fact.

Conclusion

What stays with me about Washoe City is that it did not lose. It won, twice, and it still ended.

It won the certiorari case and had Reno's election struck down. It won the injunction in the District Court and stopped the sheriff at the door. It fought for three years through two trips to the Supreme Court of Nevada, and when the thing finally went against it, one of the three justices wrote a dissent. These were not people who gave up a county seat quietly. The letter of June 20 says it exactly: the citizens of Washoe Valley had fought long and well, though without success.

But the railroad had already decided. From the moment the Virginia and Truckee reached the Carson River in 1869, there was no economic reason for ore to come down the Sierra side at all, and a town whose entire purpose was to crush rock for somebody else had nothing left to do. The county seat was the last thing it had, and holding a county seat is not a business. The courts could delay the paperwork by a year; they could not put the mule teams back on the grade.

And then in one week in June the mill burned and the records left, and the thing was simply over.

Go and stand in the Washoe City cemetery some evening with the lake behind you and look at the graves that are marked with a ring of stones. Those are the people who milled the Comstock. They lived in the largest town in this county, in a place that had a courthouse and a jail and six quartz mills and a newspaper, and the whole of it lasted about ten years. Everything they built is in the sage or in Reno.

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 narrative of the county-seat fight above is reconstructed from the Carson City and Virginia City papers of May and June 1871 — in particular a letter datelined Washoe, June 20, 1871, which walks through all three years of litigation and then reports the burning of Dall's mill; the report of the Supreme Court's decision of 2 May 1871, which records the dissent; and the one-sentence notice of the removal of the records on 21 June. The two cases themselves, State ex rel Hess and Beck vs. Smith et al. and C. W. Pegg et al. vs. Lewis Hess, are in the Nevada Reports for the July 1870 and April 1871 terms. The standard printed account of the town is in Thompson and West's History of Nevada of 1881, and the ghost-town literature derives from Stanley Paher's work.

• Thompson & West, History of Nevada (1881) — the contemporary county history, public domain and readable in full, including the courthouse and jail contracts.
• History of Washoe County (Washoe County) — the county's own account of its creation and the removal of the seat.
• Nevada Historical Marker 94 — Winters Ranch — the surviving ranch complex up the valley, National Register #74001150.
• Nevada Historical Marker 166 — Bowers Mansion — National Register #76001143, and the one place in the valley you can go inside.
• Washoe City plaque, Historical Marker Database — the 2017 E Clampus Vitus plaque, with photographs and its full text. Note that it is not a state marker.