Carson Valley

Kit Carson rode through here in 1844 guiding John Frémont, who put the scout's name on the river. The valley they crossed was a green strip of meadow and marsh along the water—the last good grass before the Sierra wall, where emigrants on the California Trail rested livestock and bought vegetables from the earliest settlers. That meadow became the foundation of Nevada agriculture: as the Comstock and later Bodie, Tonopah, and Goldfield boomed, Carson Valley fed them hay, beef, and produce. While mining camps died, the ranches stayed. The valley remains working farm country beneath the Carson Range.

What the plaque says

Carson Valley below, now a broad expanse of cultivated and pasture lands, was originally a strip of meadow along the banks of the river where 49’ers, following the California branch of the emigrant trail, rested their stock and bought vegetables from the Mormon Station owners. After discovery of the Comstock Lode (1858) settlers extended the natural meadows by irrigation to provide hay, meat and butter for the miners in Virginia City and neighboring towns. From 1870, German, Danish and Swiss immigrants enlarged the area still more to supply produce to booming Bodie and, after 1905, to supply Tonopah and Goldfield. Good range and agricultural practices have allowed Carson Valley to continue to be one of Nevada’s finest agricultural areas.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 2.7 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 6.3 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 — 8.4 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
• Stewart Indian School — 12 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

More markers nearby

• Kingsbury Grade — 2.1 mi
• Walley’s Hot Springs — 2.4 mi
• Mottsville — 3.6 mi
• Boyd Toll Road — 5.3 mi