Franktown

Franktown was once the busiest town in Washoe Valley. Founded in 1855 by Mormon settlers, it grew on milling and farming, its sawmills feeding lumber to the Comstock and a quartz mill processing ore on the valley floor. For a time it outpaced its neighbors. But when the Virginia and Truckee Railroad routed its line and the ore-milling business shifted to the Carson River, Franktown lost its reason to exist, and its people drifted away. Little remains in the valley today but the name, the creek, and the marker recalling an early Nevada settlement the railroad passed by.

What the plaque says

Orson Hyde, probate judge of Carson County, Utah Territory, founded Franktown in the Wassau (Washoe) Valley in 1855. A sawmill became an important enterprise in furnishing timber to the Comstock mines after 1859. The Dall Mill, a quartz mill of sixty stamps, employed hundreds of workers. Fertile farms surrounded the town. With the completion of the railroad from Carson City to Virginia City in 1869, the milling business rapidly lost its importance and the once prosperous town declined.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sand Harbor — 7.1 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.5 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
• Carson City — 8.4 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
• Chollar Mine — 10 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

More markers nearby

• Bowers Mansion — 0.9 mi
• The Winters Ranch — 2.9 mi
• Mount Rose Weather Observatory — 4.2 mi
• Lakeview — 4.8 mi