Boyd Toll Road

This toll road ran from the valley up to Genoa, one of the web of paid wagon roads that knit the Carson Valley to its mountain routes. When the telegraph line from Placerville through Genoa was strung along it in 1863, people started calling it the Telegraph Road—the wire and the roadbed sharing the same cleared path. Like most toll roads it eventually passed into public hands; Douglas County bought it from Henry Van Sickle and Lawrence Gilman in 1876 for twenty-six hundred fifty dollars. The route it traced still underlies travel through this part of the valley.

What the plaque says

William H. Boyd was granted a Utah Territory Franchise December 19, 1861, to provide a road to join Genoa to the Cradlebaugh Toll Road, the trunkline to the mining district of Esmeralda. Boyd's Toll Road is still visible to the northwest and southeast from this marker. When the telegraph line from Placerville through Genoa was strung along it in 1863, the Boyd Road was also called "Telegraph Road." It was purchased by Douglas County from Henry Van Sickle and Lawrence Gilman in 1876 for $2,650.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 3.8 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it
• Stewart Indian School — 9.1 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 9.9 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 11 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

More markers nearby

• Nevada’s Birthplace — 0.6 mi
• Minden — 2.6 mi
• Walley’s Hot Springs — 2.9 mi
• Kingsbury Grade — 3.6 mi