Courthouse Site 1865 – 1909

When Nevada Territory drew its county lines in 1861, Dayton became the first seat of Lyon County, and a courthouse rose here in the mid-1860s—one of the earliest in the state. For more than forty years the building handled the county's records, trials, and business. Fire took it in 1909, and the loss tipped a long-running argument: the growing farm town of Yerington wanted the seat, and in 1911 it moved south for good. Dayton kept its history but lost its courthouse. The site is marked in Old Town.

What the plaque says

Dayton was the first seat of Lyon County and had one of the first courthouses built in Nevada. Finished in 1864, local residents celebrated the new two-story brick building and its Italianate styling as an important architectural benchmark for a new state. On the afternoon of May 15, 1909, the two-story brick building burned and the county seat was moved to Yerington two years later. Utilizing the ruins, the Nevada legislature funded the construction of a high school that opened in 1918. The school closed in 1959 and the building became an elementary school, then a junior high school and is now the Dayton Valley Community Center.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 5.5 mi
  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 — 5.8 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 — 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

• Camels in Dayton — steps away
• Dayton School House – 1865 — steps away
• Union Hotel & Post Office — steps away
• Nevada’s First Gold Discovery — steps away