Mineral County, Nevada

Mineral County was part of Esmeralda County until 1911. Walker Lake appears on Nevada’s earliest maps. Jedediah Smith passed near it in 1828, Peter Skene Ogden came through in 1829, and John C. Frémont arrived in 1845 with his guide Joseph Walker, for whom the lake is named. The BLM calls it a rare perennial lake of the Great Basin, important to resident and migratory wildlife. Sportsmans Beach on the west shore is its developed campground. Esmeralda’s first county seat was at Aurora. It moved in 1883 to Hawthorne, a townsite the Carson and Colorado Railroad picked in 1880 and named for pioneer lumberman William A. Hawthorne. Goldfield took the seat in 1907, and Hawthorne got it back when Mineral County was created. After a destructive munitions explosion in the East in 1926, the Navy chose Hawthorne for a new ammunition depot, which was commissioned in 1930. In 1880 Candelaria had three doctors, three lawyers, two hotels, and ten saloons. Its leading mine, the Northern Belle, is reported to have produced about $7 million, mainly in silver. Belleville, founded in 1874, milled Northern Belle ore and became the Carson and Colorado’s terminus in December 1881. Once piped water let Candelaria run its own mills in the late 1880s, Belleville lost its business, and it was deserted by 1892. At old mine sites, keep out of shafts and adits.