Chollar Mine

Billy Chollar staked this claim in 1859, and it became one of the Comstock's first great producers—about seventeen million dollars in silver and gold, later merged into the Chollar-Potosi. What it really preserves is the reality of the work below ground: timber set in interlocking cubes to hold back crushing rock, heat that forced men to rest in ice-cooled chambers, shafts driven thousands of feet down. You can still walk a level of it. The tour takes you four hundred feet in, past the original square-set timbering, to the candle-dark where miners earned their wage.

What the plaque says

First located in 1859, the Chollar was consolidated with the Potosi in 1865. As the Chollar-Potosi, it was one of the leading producers on the Comstock. The Nevada Mill was erected here in 1887 to process low-grade Chollar ore. It was the last to use the Washoe Pan Process, but the first on the Comstock to generate and utilize electric power.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — steps away
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Virginia City — 0.5 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Carson City — 11 mi
  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 — 14 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

• Savage Mansion (1861) — 0.2 mi
• McCones’ Foundries — 0.3 mi
• Mackay Mansion — 0.3 mi
• Mark Twain — 0.6 mi