Charles W. Friend House, Observatory & Weather Station

Charles Friend wore several hats over this house: he was Carson City's self-taught astronomer, meteorologist, and watchmaker. From his home he ran a private observatory and, beginning in the 1880s, an official U.S. weather station, telegraphing daily reports and keeping the region's earliest sustained record of its skies. In an age before professional science reached small Western capitals, an amateur with a telescope and a barometer supplied the community's window on the heavens and the weather. The house preserves the memory of that one-man scientific outpost on the Nevada frontier, on Carson City's historic east side.

What the plaque says

This is the site of the house and observatory of Nevada’s first weatherman, astronomer, and seismologist, Charles William Friend. Born in Prussia in 1835, Friend immigrated by way of South America to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. In 1867, he moved from Folsom to Carson City where he set up his own jewelry and optical store. Friend built Nevada’s first observatory located southwest of his house and east of the Nevada State Capitol. Nevada’s U.S. Senator William Stewart helped him obtain the use of a six-inch equitorial mount telescope and other instruments from the federal government. Charles Friend also established Nevada’s first weather service. In 1887, the Nevada Legislature passed authorization for a weather service station in Carson City. Friend became its director and created volunteer weather stations throughout the state. He compiled the data into reports that are still referenced today. Charles W. Friend died in 1907. Since his death, the Association of Weather Services has recognized him as a pioneer in weather service west of the Rockies. Nevada Historical Marker No.258 State Historic Preservation Office, Nevada State Museum, the Bretzlaff Foundation, Nevada State Library and Archives, the Carson City Preservation Coalition, Buildings and Grounds.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — steps away
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Stewart Indian School — 3.2 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.4 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Sand Harbor — 9.2 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• State Printing Building — steps away
• Nevada’s Capital — steps away
• Carson City — steps away
• Federal Government Building (1888-1970) — steps away