Dayton Chinatown

For a few years in the late 1850s this settlement was called Chinatown, and the census was right to name it so—Chinese residents outnumbered everyone else. Most came in 1856 and 1857 to dig the Rose, or Reese, ditch, carrying Carson River water two miles to the dry placers of Gold Canyon. It was the first major construction project in what would become Nevada. Some two hundred Chinese also worked the claims that white miners had abandoned. The old ditch line is still visible on the hillside above Highway 50.

What the plaque says

Dayton is the site of Nevada’s first China Town. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, along with immigrants from Japan and Korea, moved to the United States, They were pushed by economic disruption in their home countries and pulled by the promises of gold and employment in the Rocky Mountain West. The Dayton Chinese were hired by Edward Rose in August 1857 to dig the four-mile Rose Ditch from the mouth of the Carson River west of town to the miners working the placers at the entrance to Gold Canyon. Despite discrimination, the promise of jobs compelled the Chinese to stay. They mined in Gold Canyon and settled along the Carson River in this area. The community continued to be an important hub for Chinese Americans in Nevada into the 1880s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 5.6 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 — 6.0 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

• Dayton — steps away
• Union Hotel & Post Office — steps away
• Nevada’s First Gold Discovery — steps away
• Courthouse Site 1865 – 1909 — steps away