Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps

More of Nevada's public face was drawn by Frederic DeLongchamps than by any other architect. Born in Reno in 1882, he designed hundreds of buildings across the state—the Washoe County Courthouse where so many came for quick divorces, the old Reno Post Office, county courthouses statewide, and the chain of banks built for mining magnate George Wingfield. His range ran from Beaux-Arts grandeur to streamlined Art Deco. For the first half of the twentieth century, to look at a Nevada civic building was usually to look at his work. The courthouse and post office still anchor downtown Reno.

What the plaque says

Frederic Joseph DeLongchamps was Nevada’s foremost architect of his time. Statewide, he was prolific in the number of buildings he designed. From this point, one can see a group of structures that stand, collectively, as a monument to DeLongchamps: the United State Post Office, the Riverside Hotel, the Washoe County Courthouse and the Reno National Bank Building. The Northern Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, dedicated to excellence in architecture, honors the memory of Frederic Joseph DeLongchamps.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — steps away
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 17 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
• Chollar Mine — 18 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
• Sand Harbor — 24 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

More markers nearby

• Site of Nevada’s First Public Library — steps away
• Reno — steps away
• Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877 — 0.3 mi
• N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910 — 0.4 mi