Blair

Blair exists because of a grudge over land prices. When the Pittsburgh-Silver Peak company moved to mill the Silver Peak ore in 1906, speculators there jacked up lot prices, so the company simply surveyed its own town a few miles off and built everything from scratch. The mill it raised in 1907 was the largest in Nevada, fed by ore on an aerial tramway and served by a seventeen-mile railroad. The hotel had a bath in every room. When the ore went lean in 1915, all of it vanished; foundations remain.

What the plaque says

Developed By Accident. The Pittsburgh-Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought the major mines in the area in 1906. Land speculators at nearby Silver Peak bought up the land. As a result, the mining company surveyed a new townsite north of Silver Peak and named it Blair. The company built a 100-stamp mill in 1907. The company also constructed the 17 ½ mile Silver Peak railroad from Blair Junction to the Tonopah and Goldfield main line. By 1920, Blair was all but deserted. The remnants of stone buildings and mill foundations are the only survivors of the once thriving, but short-lived, mining town.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Goldfield — 23 mi
  Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.
• Tonopah — 29 mi
  The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.

More markers nearby

• Silver Peak — 18 mi
• Southern Nevada Telephone – Telegraph Company Building — 23 mi
• Goldfield — 23 mi
• Palmetto — 24 mi