Eagle Valley

This is the ground the capital grew on. Eagle Valley took its name from Eagle Station, a trading post and ranch on the emigrant route at the foot of the Sierra. The Washoe had wintered here for generations; Mormon settlers led by John Reese ranched the valley in the 1850s before being called back to Salt Lake. When Abe Curry bought the station in 1858 and platted Carson City, the quiet valley became Nevada's seat of government almost overnight. Eagle Valley still holds most of Carson City's population, ringed by the Carson Range and the Pine Nut Mountains.

What the plaque says

Centrally located between the first Nevada settlement at Genoa and the precious metal deposits of the Comstock Lode, Eagle Valley, site of present Carson City, was a vital link in land communications. One of the key California emigrant routes, the Carson branch of the California Emigrant Trail, crossing the Sierra Nevada at Kit Carson Pass, came through Eagle Valley roughly along Sage Drive, a block east of this point. The first overland telegraph, colloquially known as “Bee’s Grapevine”, from F. A. Bee, its builder, was completed from Placerville to Carson City in 1859. In this area, it followed what is now Highway US 395. The Pony Express (1860-1861) and the Butterfield-Wells Fargo Overland Stages (1862-1868) followed the same route. The Virginia and Truckee Railway in its extension to Carson Valley and Minden in 1906 used the route of Bigelow Drive six blocks east.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stewart Indian School — 0.8 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
• Carson City — 2.7 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.9 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
• Genoa — 9.3 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it

More markers nearby

• Stewart Indian School — 0.8 mi
• Dat-So-La-Lee — 0.8 mi
• Historic Flume and Lumberyard — 1.9 mi
• Gardner’s Ranch — 1.9 mi