Carson City, Nevada

In 1851 Frank and Warren Hall and four partners set up Eagle Station, a trading post and ranch on the Carson Branch of the California Emigrant Trail. The station and its valley took their name from an eagle skin stretched on the trading post’s wall. In 1858 Abraham Curry, who found lots in Genoa too expensive, bought much of the Eagle Ranch and platted a town he called Carson City. He left a plaza at its center for a capitol, in case a seat of government ever came. It did. Carson City became the territorial capital in November 1861 and the state capital three years later, and the capitol was finished on Curry’s plaza by 1871. Curry also built the Warm Springs Hotel, where Nevada’s first Territorial Legislature met in 1861. The state bought the property for a prison in 1864. Prisoners cut sandstone from its quarry for the State Capitol and for the U.S. Mint, which struck coins from 1870 to 1893. The Carson River powered the mills that reduced Comstock ore. The first small mill at Empire went up in 1860, and the river mills ran for more than 40 years. Ore came to them by wagon and, after 1869, on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad. The Stewart Indian School was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for nearly a century, teaching American Indian students from across the West. In the early 1920s, students worked with stone masons, some of them Hopi, to build the stone buildings that still stand on the campus.