Dinner Station

Dinner Station earned its plain name honestly. On the long stage and freight road running north from Elko toward the mining camps and Idaho, this was a place to stop, rest the teams, and take a meal—one of the way stations spaced across the empty country to keep travelers and freighters moving. A stone building served the traffic in the days before automobiles, when crossing this distance meant days on the road and a hot dinner was worth marking on the map. The stage roads gave way to highways, but the site recalls the slow travel of wagon days.

What the plaque says

Dinner Station stands as a reminder of Nevada’s stagecoach era. Established in the early 1870s by William C. (Hill) Beachey as a meal stop for the Tuscarora and Mountain City Stage Lines, it was originally known as Weilands. The name later changed to Oldham’s Station when a change of ownership took place. A frame structure accommodated the traffic, but a fine two-story stone house, outbuildings, and a corral were built following a fire in the 1880s. Early in the twentieth century, both automobiles and horse-drawn stages stopped at Dinner Station and it became one of the most popular county inns of the time. After 1910, when automobiles became more common, the station ceased to be used.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elko — 19 mi
  The railroad built it, cattle made it, and gold keeps it — the working capital of northeast Nevada, a frontier cow town that never got around to becoming a relic.
• California Trail Interpretive Center — 22 mi
  A free, surprisingly ambitious BLM museum of the overland crossing — eight miles west of Elko, on the trail itself, where the California Trail met the Hastings Cutoff that doomed the Donner Party.

More markers nearby

• Tuscarora — 18 mi
• Ruby Valley Pony Express Station — 19 mi
• Elko — 19 mi
• Elko Airport — 19 mi