Lyon County, Nevada

Nevada’s first gold discovery was made in what is now Lyon County. In July 1849 Abner Blackburn, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, found gold at the mouth of Gold Canyon. By the spring of 1851 some 200 placer miners were working there, and the continuous settlement at the canyon mouth makes it Nevada’s first non-Native American settlement. Ten years after Blackburn’s find, prospecting up the canyon led to the ore deposits at Gold Hill and Virginia City. The town at the canyon mouth went by several names before it became Dayton in 1861, after John Day, who laid it out. It prospered for decades as a mill and trading center. Dayton was the first Lyon County seat, but its two-story brick courthouse burned on May 15, 1909, and the seat moved to Yerington two years later. Adolph Sutro’s drainage tunnel was started in 1869, and miners finished the main bore in 1878, giving many Comstock mines drainage, ventilation, and access. The work built the town of Sutro, with 600 to 800 people, a church, a post office, and a weekly paper. See Sutro Tunnel. The Wilson family settled around Wilson Canyon in 1863, mining gold that “Uncle Billy” Wilson had found at Pine Grove and ranching in Mason Valley. Wovoka, a Northern Paiute raised with the Wilson boys, started the Ghost Dance movement in 1890. Wabuska became Mason Valley’s main supply point on the Carson and Colorado Railroad in 1881, and later the north end of the Nevada Copper Belt Railroad, built 1909 to 1911.