Galena

Galena boomed early and burned out fast. Founded in 1860 in the timbered foothills of the Carson Range, it grew quickly into a busy lumber and mining town, cutting Sierra wood for the Comstock and working nearby ore. For a few years it was among the liveliest places in the Truckee Meadows. But fire and shifting economics undid it—the mills moved on, the mines disappointed, and the town faded as fast as it had risen. Nothing of the settlement survives in the canyon today. The name lives on in Galena Creek and the regional park where the marker stands.

What the plaque says

Galena had a dual personality. It was developed in 1860 as a mining property by R. S. and Andrew Hatch. The Hatch brothers' quartz mill and smelter were among the earliest erected on this side of the Sierras. The gold float from the local mines contained a heavy admixture of lead sulphide, "galena," which caused the mining operations to be non-paying, but the mills continued to operate, processing ores from the Comstock mines. The severe winter of 1864-65 interrupted freighting to Virginia City, and the ensuing mining depression forced the Galena mills to close. The town also developed into an important lumbering center. Eleven sawmills were operating by 1863, and Galena boasted stores, lodging houses, a justice court, a school which doubled as a community hall, saloons, and dozens of homes. After two disastrous fires in 1865 and 1867, Galena was abandoned.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 9.7 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 — 9.8 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
• Reno — 11 mi
  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
• Sand Harbor — 13 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

• Galena Creek Fish Hatchery — 2.4 mi
• The Winters Ranch — 3.6 mi
• Steamboat Springs — 4.2 mi
• Mount Rose Weather Observatory — 5.5 mi