White Pine County, Nevada

White Pine County began with a silver rush. Large discoveries on Treasure Hill in 1868 drew roughly 10,000 people, many of them living in huts and caves, and Hamilton became the first county seat in 1869. A fire on June 27, 1873 destroyed the main part of town, and it never fully recovered. A second fire burned the courthouse in 1885, and the seat moved to Ely. Silver also built the six beehive Ward Charcoal Ovens, used from 1876 through 1879 for ore from the Ward Mining District two miles north. The state park there was established in 1969. Copper came next. Mark Requa’s Nevada Consolidated Copper Company built about 150 miles of the Nevada Northern Railway from Cobre to Ely in 1905 and 1906. Its trains hauled ore from Copper Flat, west of Ely, to the smelter at McGill. The railroad stopped running in 1983 after the local copper mines closed, and the East Ely shop complex became a National Historic Landmark District in 2006. On the east side of the county, Congress established Great Basin National Park on October 27, 1986, folding in Lehman Caves National Monument. The park holds bristlecone pine groves and Wheeler Peak, the highest peak contained within Nevada.