Douglas County, Nevada

A state marker calls Carson Valley the birthplace of Nevada. By 1851 settlers were living at a place they called Mormon Station, renamed Genoa in 1856. With an early post office and local government, it can claim to be Nevada’s first town. The site is now Mormon Station State Historic Park. Forty-niners on the California branch of the Emigrant Trail rested their stock on the river meadows and bought vegetables from the station’s owners. Mottsville was settled in 1852 and Sheridan around 1854. Pony Express riders used this road in 1860, then switched a year later to the shorter Daggett Trail, now Kingsbury Grade. After the Comstock strike, settlers irrigated past the natural meadows to grow hay, meat, and butter for Virginia City. From 1870, German, Danish, and Swiss immigrants farmed still more of the valley to supply Bodie and, after 1905, Tonopah and Goldfield. In 1862 David and Harriet Walley opened a $100,000 spa beside the emigrant trail at Walley’s Hot Springs, where the water comes up at 136 to 160 degrees F. It sold for $5,000 in 1896 and ran until a fire in 1935. In the south end of the Pine Nut Mountains, Double Springs was a station on the road between Carson and Walker valleys, used by travelers bound for Esmeralda County. Up at Spooner Summit, the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company ran a narrow-gauge railroad from Glenbrook from 1875 to 1898. It fed an 11-mile V-flume down Clear Creek that carried timber and cordwood toward the Comstock.