Forty Acres Near the Tannery: The Washoe County Poor House

No photograph of the Washoe County poor house is known to survive. The image above is the Nevada State Prison and Warm Springs near Carson City, photographed in 1866 — a Nevada public institution of the same era, shown here for period context only.

On the morning of Friday, April 5, 1889, a woman died of typhoid fever at the Washoe County Hospital, about a mile outside Reno. That evening the paper printed four sentences about her.

Died at the County Hospital. Mrs. Rickey, a Spanish woman, died at the county hospital this morning of typhoid fever. She has quite a romantic history, and, although a woman of the town, was possessed of many good qualities. She was an important witness in the "Lucky" Baldwin breach-of-promise case a year or two ago, and was the means of saving Baldwin against a judgment, as she testified to the girl's character, which, being loose before Baldwin's intimacy with her, saved him.

Read it again and notice what it is actually about.

It is not about Mrs. Rickey. It gives her no first name. It gives her no age, no birthplace beyond "a Spanish woman," no family, no cause for her being in a county institution at all, and no funeral. What it gives her instead is a paragraph about a rich man in California whose lawsuit she had helped to win — by testifying that another woman was unchaste.

Her obituary is a story about somebody else, and the somebody else is the man who got off.

That is the Washoe County poor house. Not a scandal, not a horror story. An institution where the arithmetic was public, the building was deliberately left half-finished, the doctor came out in a buggy, and the people who died in it got four sentences, if that.

This is what the record actually says about it.

Forty Acres Near the Tannery

In the spring of 1876 the Washoe County Commissioners bought land.

The Reno evening paper reported the transaction on the thirtieth of March, under the heading "County Poor Farm." The commissioners had purchased forty acres of land, near the tannery, at a cost of one thousand dollars, and had advertised for bids on plans drawn up by a man named J. F. Peacock.

Two things in that sentence are worth stopping on.

The first is the name of the thing. It was not a hospital. The county's own advertisement called it the County Poor House, to be built on the County Poor Farm. "County Hospital" was the word used later, by reporters and by the doctor, when somebody was being shown around. The word on the paperwork was poor.

The second is the location, and it is the detail that lets you stand where it was: near the tannery.

Reno Had a Tannery

It is one of those facts that falls out of the record sideways and changes the picture of a town.

Eight months before the county bought the poor farm, in June of 1875, a Reno paper ran this:

The Reno Tannery will be thrown open for the inspection of the public on Monday next. During the day carriages will run from the Lake House, carrying free. Leather dealers and workers, and butchers, and all persons feeling interested in home manufacture are requested to be present. The first Nevada made leather will be sold on that day.

The first leather ever made in Nevada was sold in Reno in June 1875, and the town laid on free carriages from the hotel so people could come out and watch it being done.

This is not a digression. A tannery is one of the half-dozen trades that has to be put somewhere a town does not have to smell it — outside the settled part, downwind, near water, next to the slaughtering. It is where you put the things you need and do not want to look at.

And that is precisely where the county then bought forty acres to put its paupers.

Nobody wrote that down as a decision. Nobody had to. The commissioners bought cheap ground on the edge of town, next to the hides, because that is what the ground was for.

They Built Half a Building

This is the part that tells you everything, and it is sitting in plain sight in a newspaper column that nobody has quoted in a hundred and fifty years.

Peacock drew two plans. The commissioners had capped what they would spend on the building at three thousand five hundred dollars. The paper explained what that meant in practice:

Bidders on plan No. 2 are to contract for its completion. Proposals upon plan No. 1 must provide for completion of the lower story and exterior of the building. This last, if completed, would cost $5,500 or $6,000; but the Commissioners have decided to reserve a portion of the fund for furnishing the house and improving the farm. We hope, however, that bids may be received upon plan No. 1, in the neighborhood of $3,500, for the one story will be ample to satisfy the county's wants at present, and until the structure can be completed.

Plan No. 1 was not a smaller building. It was an unfinished one. Ground floor and exterior walls, finished enough to be weatherproof and lived in; the upper story left as a shell, to be completed later — "until the structure can be completed," in the paper's own words.

The full building would have cost five and a half to six thousand dollars. The county would spend three and a half, and keep the rest back for furniture and for improving the farm.

And the paper approved. It said so plainly, and the sentence is worth having in front of you because it is the whole philosophy of the place:

We strongly favor the erection of good, lasting buildings for county purposes. Economy in the use of the public funds is commendable…

I do not read that as cruelty. I read it as a county of about five thousand people, four years after a depression, deciding what the poor were worth in dollars, writing the figure down, and printing it in the evening paper where anybody could read it. Three thousand five hundred. One story. The rest when we can.

"County Poor House Bids"

The advertisement had run daily on page four of the morning paper through the last week of January and the first week of February 1876. It is a dry document and I am going to quote it almost whole, because the dryness is the point.

Sealed proposals will be received by the Board of County Commissioners, Washoe county, Nevada… until 10 o'clock A. M. of the 7th day of February, A. D. 1876, for the building of a County Poor House for Washoe county, Nevada… Building to be erected on the County Poor Farm, on a spot to be designated by the Board of Commissioners — all material to be furnished by the contractor — one-third of the contract price to be paid upon completion of the foundation and erection of the frame; one-third when the building is enclosed and windows put in, and the balance on completion of the building… Bids to be addressed to the Clerk of the Board of Commissioners, and marked "County Poor House Bids."

One-third on the foundation and frame. One-third when the windows are in. The balance on completion.

It is a perfectly ordinary construction contract. It is also, read slowly, a schedule of how a building for the destitute got made in 1876: a frame, then windows, then whatever was left.

What the Reporter Saw

It went up fast. By October of 1876 it was open, and the county physician took a reporter out to see it.

He drove him in a buggy, about a mile from town. The reporter was impressed, and said so in terms that are worth measuring against the building contract. It was, he wrote, a comfortable building of sixteen rooms, all hard finished, conveniently arranged and well ventilated. Inside were nine patients: eight men and one woman.

Sixteen rooms and nine people, in a building whose upper story the county had declined to pay for.

The doctor was Dr. S. Bishop, and the reporter named him by his office: the county physician. Six years later he would be running the Nevada State Insane Asylum, and five years after that he would be under investigation for how he ran it. The man taking a reporter around the poor house in 1876 is the same man who, in 1887, was sworn to have gone twenty-one days without visiting a ward.

And there was a second man on the premises, whose name has not appeared in any account of this institution until now. The steward — the man who actually lived with it, fed it, and ran it day to day — was D. D. Bowen.

The Steward Was a Party Man

Two years later, on the first of October 1878, the Democrats of Washoe County held their county convention at the Academy of Music in Reno. The paper was tart about it — the delegates were tardy, there was a misunderstanding about the hour, and at eleven o'clock the chairman of the central committee finally called the thing to order.

D. D. Bowen was elected temporary chairman.

That single line does more work than it looks like. The steward of the county poor house was not a hired manager or a matron or a farmer. He was a man who could be put in the chair at a county convention — which is to say a man with standing in the party that controlled the board of commissioners that awarded his position.

I want to be careful here, because the inference is easy and the evidence is one line. There is no document showing that Bowen got the stewardship as a reward. But county appointments in Nevada in the 1870s went through the commissioners, and a man who chairs the county convention is a man the commissioners know.

Hold it next to the doctor. Bishop collected county medical appointments across at least two counties and had a brother who superintended the richest mining plant on the Comstock. Bowen ran the poor house and chaired the Democratic county convention.

Both of the men responsible for Washoe County's destitute held their posts through the same machinery that decided everything else in the county. That is not a scandal. It is simply how it worked, and it explains a great deal about what was never looked into.

Forty-Five Dollars, and Ten

In August of 1882 the commissioners allowed a list of claims, and two consecutive lines of it say more about the place than any description:

Dr. S. Bishop, hospital — 45 00
Dr. S. Bishop, insane — 10 00

Fifty-five dollars a month, in two line items, bought Washoe County the whole of its medical care for the indigent and the insane.

Not fifty-five dollars per person. Fifty-five dollars for the arrangement — a contract price for a service, with the patient count varying and the fee not. Which means that every additional sick person who turned up at that door made the doctor's bargain slightly worse, and the county's slightly better.

That is the quiet mechanism at the centre of this. Nobody had to be cruel. The incentive did the work.

The Hospital Before This One

The usual account has Washoe County going without any hospital at all between 1867, when the old building at Washoe City was disposed of, and 1876, when the poor farm opened.

That is wrong, and the correction is in the same 1876 article that describes the new building. The reporter, praising the new place, could not help comparing it with the old one. He had been several times, he wrote, into "the old, miserable hospital which stood near the corner of Second and Virginia streets."

So there was one. It was in Reno, on a corner that is now the middle of downtown, and the only description of it we have is from a man who was relieved not to be going back.

The county seat moved from Washoe City to Reno in June 1871, in the week that a mill burned and the records left town. The hospital function came north with everything else. The poor did not stop existing between 1867 and 1876; they were simply kept in a worse building and nobody wrote about it.

Two People Without First Names

Here is the thing I did not expect to find, and it is the reason this article exists.

The man who ran the medical care of Washoe County's poor for the better part of fifteen years, and who then ran the State of Nevada's asylum through the worst scandal in its history, appears in thirty-six years of Nevada print as "Dr. S. Bishop." No first name. Not once.

The woman who died of typhoid in his institution on an April morning in 1889 appears as "Mrs. Rickey, a Spanish woman." No first name. Not once.

The superintendent and the pauper, at opposite ends of the same building, and the record will not give either of them a given name.

For him it was probably protection — a man with initials only is hard to follow across a state line, and he ended his days comfortably in Sacramento. For her it was the opposite. She was not being shielded. She simply did not warrant the ink.

The Question Nobody Answered

There is one more thing in the record and it points straight back at this place.

On the fourteenth of May, 1887, at the investigation into the state asylum, a Washoe County farmer named B. G. Clow testified that he had known Dr. Bishop fifteen or twenty years, at Washoe City. The examining attorney then asked whether he had served on a grand jury there in those years.

The objection came instantly. And the general appearing in the matter explained, for the record, what the question was reaching for: an inquiry that had come before a Washoe County grand jury, back when the county seat was at Washoe City, "pertaining to Dr. Bishop's administration of a public institution at that time."

The board sustained the objection. The answer was never given.

Washoe County in those years had one public institution a physician could be said to administer, and it was the one in this article — first the old miserable building at Second and Virginia, then the forty acres near the tannery. A grand jury looked into how he ran it. Nothing came of it. Twenty years later the state looked into how he ran a bigger one, and arrived at the same place.

I cannot tell you what the grand jury was looking at. Nobody can, from the newspapers. That answer, if it survives anywhere, is in the Washoe County grand jury minute books, and as far as I can establish nobody has opened them since.

At a Glance: The Washoe County Poor House

• Official name: the County Poor House, standing on the County Poor Farm. "County Hospital" was the courtesy name used in print.
• The land: forty acres, bought for $1,000 in the spring of 1876, "near the tannery" — roughly a mile outside Reno.
• The tannery: the Reno Tannery opened to public inspection in June 1875, with free carriages running from the Lake House. "The first Nevada made leather will be sold on that day."
• The plans: drawn by J. F. Peacock. Two of them.
• The money: commissioners capped the building at $3,500. The complete building would have cost $5,500–$6,000. They chose plan No. 1 — lower story and exterior only, upper story left unfinished "until the structure can be completed" — and reserved the balance for furnishing the house and improving the farm.
• The contract: advertised daily through late January and early February 1876; bids closed 10 a.m., 7 February 1876; paid one-third on foundation and frame, one-third when the windows were in, balance on completion. Bids marked "County Poor House Bids."
• Open by October 1876: sixteen rooms, hard finished and well ventilated, about a mile from town, with nine inmates — eight men and one woman.
• The county physician: Dr. S. Bishop, later superintendent of the Nevada State Insane Asylum.
• The steward: D. D. Bowen — a name absent from every previous account. On 1 October 1878 he was elected temporary chairman of the Washoe County Democratic convention.
• What the county paid: in August 1882, "Dr. S. Bishop, hospital — $45.00" and "Dr. S. Bishop, insane — $10.00" — two line items, fifty-five dollars a month for the county's whole indigent and insane medical care.
• The predecessor: "the old, miserable hospital which stood near the corner of Second and Virginia streets" in Reno. Washoe County was not hospital-less between 1867 and 1876, as is usually said.
• A death in it: 5 April 1889 — "Mrs. Rickey, a Spanish woman," of typhoid fever. Her obituary spent its four sentences on a California millionaire's lawsuit.
• The unanswered question: 14 May 1887, the asylum investigation — a question about a Washoe City grand jury inquiry into "Dr. Bishop's administration of a public institution at that time" was objected to and the objection sustained.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was a county poor house?

Before any public welfare system existed, the care of the destitute was a county charge. Counties bought a farm, put a building on it, hired a steward to run it and a physician to attend it, and anyone with no money, no family and nowhere to go ended up there — the old, the sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the simply broke. It was both an infirmary and a last address. The farm was meant to defray the cost by having the inmates work it.

Where exactly was it?

Not established to a street corner. The record gives two clues: about a mile from Reno, and near the tannery. Pinning the Reno Tannery of 1875 on the ground — which the Sanborn maps and the county records should do — would put the forty acres within a block. That is the next piece of work on this subject, and I would rather say so than guess.

Is the building still standing?

Almost certainly not, and I can find no record of when it came down. A half-finished 1876 frame building on the edge of a growing town is not a thing that survives.

Who was Mrs. Rickey?

We do not know. The paper gave her no first name, described her as "a Spanish woman" and "a woman of the town" — the period euphemism for a prostitute — and devoted the rest of her obituary to the breach-of-promise suit against the California millionaire E. J. "Lucky" Baldwin, in which she had testified about another woman's character. She died of typhoid fever in the county hospital on the morning of 5 April 1889.

Was anything wrong at the poor house?

The honest answer is that we do not know, and that the not knowing is itself the finding. A grand jury at Washoe City examined Dr. Bishop's administration of a public institution sometime between about 1867 and 1872. Nothing came of it and no account of it survives in print. In 1887 an attorney tried to raise it and was shut down. Everything else is inference from the arithmetic: a capped building, a flat monthly fee, a physician with a buggy and other appointments, and a steward who chaired the county convention.

How does this connect to the asylum?

Directly, through one man. Dr. S. Bishop ran the county's medical care for the poor and the insane, and when Nevada opened a state asylum at Reno at the end of 1882 the job went to the man already doing it locally. The asylum on Glendale and its unmarked graves are the sequel to this building.

Conclusion

I went looking for horrors and found arithmetic, and the arithmetic turned out to be worse.

There is no atrocity in this story. Nobody is beaten, nothing burns, no scandal breaks. What there is instead is a county that sat down in March of 1876, worked out what a building for its poor was worth, decided on three thousand five hundred dollars against a real cost of nearly six, bought forty acres next to the tannery because that ground was cheap and already smelled, put up a house with the top floor left unbuilt, hired the man who chaired the party convention to run it, paid a doctor fifty-five dollars a month to attend to everyone in it, and printed all of it in the newspaper, where the editor called it commendable economy.

Every one of those decisions was reasonable on its own. Together they are a description of exactly how much a person without money was worth in this county, and the figure was published.

And then, thirteen years later, a woman died there on an April morning and got four sentences, three of which were about a millionaire in California.

That is what I keep going back to. Not the building. The obituary. Somebody at that paper knew she had died, knew enough about her to call her a woman of the town, knew her role in a famous lawsuit — and could not think of a single thing to say about her own life. Her last public act, as the record has it, was helping a rich man avoid a judgment by testifying that another woman was unchaste. Then typhoid, in a county building on forty acres near the tannery, and no first name.

Somewhere out past where the tannery stood, under whatever is there now, is the ground where Washoe County kept the people it had no other plan for. Nine of them in 1876, eight men and one woman. I would like to know her name too.

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. This article is built from period Nevada newspapers rather than from any secondary account, because no secondary account of this institution exists. The call for bids ran on page four of the Reno morning paper through late January and early February 1876; the "County Poor Farm" editorial, with the forty acres, the thousand dollars, J. F. Peacock and the two plans, is the Reno evening paper of 30 March 1876, page 2; the Reno Tannery opening is the morning paper of 17 June 1875, page 3; the visit to the new building, "Dr. S. Bishop, the county physician," the sixteen rooms and the nine inmates are the evening paper of 10 October 1876, page 3; D. D. Bowen's election as temporary chairman is the evening paper of 1 October 1878, page 3; the two commissioners' claim lines are 7 August 1882; the death of Mrs. Rickey is the evening paper of 5 April 1889, page 3; and the suppressed grand-jury question is the evening paper of 14 May 1887. The Washoe County grand jury minute books have not been consulted and are the obvious next step.

• The Doctor With No First Name: Dr. S. Bishop and the Question Nobody Was Allowed to Answer — the county physician who ran this place, his Eureka years, and the brother who superintended the Bowers mine.
• The Asylum on Glendale: Nevada's State Hospital and the Graves Nobody Mapped — the institution this one led to, and the burial ground behind it.
• Washoe City: The Town That Beat Reno in Court and Lost Anyway — where the county's first hospital stood, and the week in 1871 when the county seat left.
• Thompson & West, History of Nevada (1881) — the contemporary county history, public domain, for Washoe County's officers and institutions in these years.
• History of Washoe County (Washoe County) — the county's own account of its early institutions and the 1867 disposal of the Washoe City hospital building.