Wedekind City: The Town You Never Knew in the Heart of Sparks, Nevada

Drive north out of Sparks on Pyramid Way and you will pass a corner with a landscaping yard on it, a nursery, an old storage shed, and a road sign that says Wedekind. Nobody slows down. There is nothing to see. But a hundred and twenty years ago that ground carried a town of thirty buildings with telephone service and electric light, a thirty-ton mill, a boarding house, an assay office, and a post office, and the road you are driving was being cut to pieces by ore wagons hauling rock worth up to ten thousand dollars a ton down into Reno.

It lasted about five years. It was found by a man who sold pianos.

The Piano Man

George H. Wedekind came to Nevada in the early 1870s as the representative of a piano company. He settled first in White Pine County, which at that moment was still coming down off the silver excitement that had built and emptied Treasure City on the ridge above Hamilton, and he divided his time, as the papers later put it, between selling pianos and prospecting. A few years on he moved down to Reno and went into the piano business there, and he kept prospecting on the side.

That is a sentence worth sitting with. Every mining camp in Nevada has its origin story, and most of them involve a man who was already a miner. Wedekind was a salesman who tuned and sold parlor instruments to the respectable houses of Reno, and on his days off he walked the dry hills northeast of town with a pick, in country everybody had already decided was worthless. He was close to sixty when he was proved right.

The story goes that in 1896, out in the hills a couple of miles north of the new railroad town of Sparks, he picked up a crumbling piece of yellow rock. The assay came back at six hundred to twelve hundred dollars a ton. It took him until 1900 to turn that into a located mine, on the road up the Spanish Springs valley about five miles northeast of Reno. That road is Pyramid Way now. The hill he was standing on is the one the subdivisions climb today.

Seventy Thousand Dollars in the Bank Vault

What came out of that hill in the first two years was extraordinary, and it came out fast. The ore body spread out fan-shaped as the miners followed it, widening even on the horizontal workings. They drove tunnels off the main one like the fingers of a hand, diverging at angles of ten to twenty degrees. As the hill rose over the workings the earth above checked the oxidation of the ore and the chloride began to take on a sulphide character, and the miners noticed something that does not happen often: the floors of their tunnels were carrying better values than the roofs. So they began to incline, following the dip of the streaks down.

Almost nothing was wasted. No stoping was done at all. Every wheelbarrow load went straight to the ore house, where it was sacked and shipped out to the smelter at Selby's on San Francisco Bay. The road from the mine down to Reno was soon rutted deep by the ore wagons, and the station platform in town stood piled high with rock that ran anywhere from fifty dollars to ten thousand dollars a ton.

In almost no time George Wedekind had seventy thousand dollars in the bank vault.

And here is the part that tells you what the mining business was actually like. Even with that showing — even with the sacks going out and the money coming in — the experts would not move. The best-qualified mining man in the state looked the property over and offered fifteen thousand dollars for it. Fifteen. Speculators came out by the score hunting working bonds, and the best of them talked about a hundred thousand. The men who knew the most were the most afraid, and the piano salesman had already been paid more than their valuation by the smelter.

The Rancher Who Bought It

The man who did buy it was John Sparks, and if the name sounds familiar it is because the city you just drove out of is named after him. Sparks was a Texas-born cattleman who had built one of the great Nevada ranching operations, and in 1901 he paid a hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars for the piano salesman's claims — the Reno Star, the Safeguard and the Precaution, together with the mill site. Two years later he was Governor of Nevada.

Sparks put money into the hill the way a rancher puts money into water. He built a thirty-ton mill, and it was a serious plant. Ore came down from the workings on a track into the ore bins, through a rock-breaker and a set of rolls, then into a huge revolving roaster, and from there into tanks where it was chemically treated so the values stayed in solution to be precipitated out and reduced to bullion. It was an improved version of a process that had been run years earlier over at Cortez, and the men who wrote it up were impressed.

Around the mill a town assembled, the way towns did. Developers laid out streets. Houses went up — around thirty buildings all told, with a store, a machine shop, an assay office and a boarding house. A telephone line ran down to Reno. Most of the homes had electricity, which in 1902 was not a small thing for a camp five miles out in the sagebrush. A post office opened. People talked seriously about an electric railway coming up from town. And the place had a name: Wedekind City, after the old man whose faithful work as a prospector had made it.

The Quarrel at the Barbecue

There is a wrinkle in the record that deserves to be said out loud, because it is a useful warning about every boom story ever printed.

In September 1902 the Reno morning paper ran a full front page on the Wedekind mines — the discovery, the tunnels, the mill, the money. It is the single richest description of the place that survives, and most of what you have just read comes out of it. The same day it appeared, John Sparks threw a barbecue, and several hundred people came. Partway through, a judge climbed up onto the platform and announced to the crowd that the article in that morning's paper about the Wedekind mine was prejudiced, incorrect, and — he intimated — malicious.

The paper came back at him the next morning, as papers do, saying the judge could not have been speaking the truth and that his reading of the piece, or his grasp of the facts, or whoever had given him his information, was faulty. Nobody ever settled it in print. There had also already been litigation over the property, with a man named Bell on the other side of it, running through the courts in 1901.

So read the big numbers the way you would read any boom-time prospectus. The ore was real — the smelter receipts and the bank balance prove that much. The valuations were being published by people who wanted the camp to succeed, in a town that wanted a mine, and at least one prominent man stood up in front of a crowd and called it false.

Two Hundred and Thirty Feet

The mill was the first disappointment. For all its machinery it made only a few shipments; the losses in milling ran too high to carry the operation, and the sacked ore that had made the mine famous had been the easy part.

The real end came underground. At about two hundred and thirty feet the workings struck hot water, acid and foul, and with it bad air. There is no engineering against that at the scale a thirty-ton mill supports. You cannot keep men in a hole that is trying to poison them, and you cannot pump the Nevada underground dry on a camp's budget. The work stopped. The post office closed in 1905. The streets that had been laid out stayed laid out, with nothing coming to fill them, and the people went down the hill to Reno and Sparks, where there was work on the railroad.

Thirty years later the place was still remembered in town as the boom that had happened in everybody's backyard. When the old man's son died in 1918 — Louis Wedekind, who had been superintendent of his father's mine and who finished his life ranching out at Fernley — the Reno paper that carried his funeral notice used it as an occasion to look back, and noted almost in passing that some of the buildings of the old Wedekind mine were still standing out there, five miles northeast of Reno on the Spanish Spring valley road.

We Called It the Sixes

I did not learn any of this from a book. I learned the ground first, the way kids do.

Growing up we rode dirt bikes and BMX bikes up there, on the high ground off Sullivan on the east side of Pyramid Way, and we called the place the Sixes. It was the kind of spot every town has and no adult knows about: broken concrete, good dirt, nothing to damage, nobody to tell you to leave. What we were riding on were the remains of a mill. I did not know that then. You could stand up there and look back down at the hill and see the mine shaft itself from Pyramid Way, and we never once connected the hole in the hill to the concrete under our tires.

Two things up there I have never been able to explain. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary. And there was a concrete wall that ran out and then curved around into a half circle, the way the corner of a building curves, except that nothing about it felt like a building. Standing in it, the shape read like an enclosure. I have thought for years that it might have been a cemetery.

I want to be straight that I do not know. A camp of thirty buildings that ran five years, with a mill and a boarding house and families in it, buried people somewhere — camps always did, and the burying ground is usually the last thing anybody records and the first thing anybody forgets. But a Marian statue is just as likely to have been set up by a rancher or a homeowner in the decades after, and a curved concrete wall can be a tank foundation, a settling pond, an ore bin or a cistern as easily as it can be anything else. The mill is documented. The shaft is visible. The half circle and the statue are not in any record I have found, and I would rather leave an honest question on the page than invent an answer for it. If you grew up riding the Sixes too, or your family ranched that ground, I would like to hear from you.

What Is There Now

After the mine the land went back to what it had been before: range and ranch. The Italian ranching families who had been working the valleys around Sparks since the eighties took it up, and one name in particular stuck to the ground hard enough to still be on a street sign — Lepori, a family whose ranch company, partnerships and family trust were still turning up on the Washoe County rolls a hundred years after the mill shut down.

Then came the subdivisions. The hill that was Wedekind City is houses now. The road that the ore wagons ruined is a state highway with a name on it, and there is a county park on the slope. The corner where Queens Way meets Pyramid Way, with its landscaping yard and nursery and the one old storage building that looks older than everything around it, is sitting on the apron of a vanished town.

That is the thing about the Truckee Meadows that people from elsewhere never quite believe. The ghost towns are not all three hours out in the desert. One of them is under a subdivision in north Sparks, and the only monument it has is a street sign carrying the name of a man who sold pianos.

At a Glance: Wedekind City

• Who: George H. Wedekind, who came to Nevada in the early 1870s as a piano company's representative, settled in White Pine County, moved to Reno, and prospected on the side.
• What: a crumbling piece of yellow rock picked up about two miles north of Sparks in 1896, assaying $600 to $1,200 a ton; the mine located in 1900, about five miles northeast of Reno on the Spanish Springs valley road — today's Pyramid Way, near Wedekind Road.
• The claims: the Reno Star, the Safeguard and the Precaution, plus the mill site. Silver chloride, with zinc and gold.
• The ore: shipped sacked to Selby's; rock running from $50 to $10,000 a ton; roughly $70,000 banked by the discoverer before he sold.
• The valuation gap: Nevada's best-regarded mining man offered $15,000 for the mine; speculators talked of $100,000.
• The buyer: John Sparks, cattleman, who paid $155,000 for the claims and mill site in 1901 and became Governor of Nevada in 1903. The city of Sparks carries his name.
• The town: about thirty buildings, store, machine shop, assay office, boarding house, telephone line to Reno, electricity in most homes, a post office, and talk of an electric railway.
• The mill: thirty tons, with rock-breaker, rolls, a revolving roaster and precipitation tanks — an improved version of a process run earlier at Cortez. It made only a few shipments; milling losses were too heavy.
• The end: hot acid water and bad air at about 230 feet. Post office closed 1905. Some mine buildings were still standing in 1918.
• Afterward: ranch land, latterly associated with the Lepori family; then subdivision. The name survives on Wedekind Road and a county park.
• On the ground: substantial mill remains survive on the high ground off Sullivan, east of Pyramid Way — ridden for years by local kids who called the spot the Sixes. The shaft is visible from Pyramid Way. A Marian statue and a curving concrete half-circle wall stand among the remains, unidentified in any record found so far.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where exactly was Wedekind City?

About five miles northeast of Reno on what the papers of the day called the Spanish Spring valley road, which is Pyramid Way today. The mine and camp were on the hill east of that road, in the area now carrying Wedekind Road and the county park of the same name, north of Sparks.

Was George Wedekind really a piano salesman?

Yes. He came to Nevada in the early 1870s representing a piano company, settled in White Pine County and split his time between selling instruments and prospecting, then moved to Reno and carried on in the piano business there while prospecting on the side. He was not a mining man by trade, which is exactly why the mining men underbid him.

What killed the mine?

Two things in sequence. The mill lost too much of the value in processing to pay its way, and then the underground work hit hot, acidic water and bad air at roughly two hundred and thirty feet. The post office closed in 1905.

Is there anything left to see?

More than you would think. Mine buildings were still standing in 1918, and substantial mill remains are still up on the high ground off Sullivan on the east side of Pyramid Way, where generations of local kids rode bikes on them without knowing what they were. The shaft can be picked out from Pyramid Way. Much of the rest of the hill is houses now, and the name survives on a state highway and a regional park.

What is the connection to the city of Sparks?

John Sparks, who bought the mine in 1901, became Governor of Nevada in 1903. The railroad town laid out east of Reno during his governorship was named for him. So the man whose name is on the city is also the man who owned the silver mine just north of it.

Conclusion

Nevada's mining history gets told as a story about men who knew what they were doing — engineers, assayers, syndicates, capital. Wedekind is the other story. A piano dealer walked out of Reno on his days off for years, found silver where the professionals had stopped looking, banked seventy thousand dollars while the best mining man in the state was offering him fifteen, and sold out to a cattle rancher who would be governor inside two years. Then the hill filled with hot water and the whole thing was over in five, and the town it built went so completely that people now drive through it to buy shrubs.

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 contemporary newspaper accounts drawn on here are the Nevada State Journal of September 10, 1902 (the front-page account of the discovery, the workings and the mill), the Nevada State Journal of September 11, 1902 (the dispute over that account at the Sparks barbecue), the Nevada State Journal of August 24, 1901 (the Wedekind–Bell litigation), and the Reno Evening Gazette of August 8, 1918 (the death of Louis G. Wedekind, which supplies the family history and the location of the mine).

• Sparks Museum & Cultural Center — the local authority on this ground, and the source of the claim names, the assay figures and the 1901 sale price, drawing on Joyce M. Cox's Images of Sparks, Nevada.
• Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection — holds a photograph of the Wedekind mines contributed by the Sparks Museum.
• Nevada Historical Society — photographs, maps and manuscripts for Washoe County mining and ranching.
• University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections and University Archives — the mining-company records and photograph collections for the Truckee Meadows.
• Mindat: Wedekind Mining District, Washoe County — the mineralogy and workings of the district.
• Washoe County: Wedekind Regional Park — the public land on the old ground.
• Chronicling America, Library of Congress — free digitized Nevada newspapers.

Hero image: the Wedekind mines near Sparks, Nevada, photographer unknown, taken during the working life of the mine, about 1900–1903. Courtesy of the Sparks Museum & Cultural Center, via the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection; caption information from Joyce M. Cox, Images of Sparks, Nevada.