Gardner’s Ranch

This ranch tied the capital to its farm country. John Gardner homesteaded along the creek south of Carson City, running one of the early valley operations that fed the mining towns with beef, hay, and produce when the camps could grow nothing for themselves. The Gardner name traveled south to the Carson Valley town of Gardnerville, founded on his former holdings. The ranch represents the quieter half of the region's economy—the agriculture that outlasted the silver—standing in contrast to the mills and mines just over the hills. The site is marked along the old road south of town.

What the plaque says

On this site in the period from 1870 until 1918 stood the ornate two-story home of Mathew Culbertson Gardner, rancher and lumberman. The residence was headquarters for Gardner’s 300 acre ranch in Meadows to the Southward. Here was located, 1870 – 1898, the Carson – Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company’s large lumberyard. During the 1870’s and 1880’s Gardner logged south of Lake Tahoe for the company and built the only standard gauge logging railroad in the Tahoe Basin. He maintained his home here. Gardner died in 1908. The residence was destroyed by a fire August 20, 1918. Many of the old trees on the ground once shaded the Gardner family. State Historical Marker No. 194 Nevada State Park System Carson City Historical Commission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — 0.8 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
• Stewart Indian School — 2.5 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.3 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
• Sand Harbor — 9.3 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

• Historic Flume and Lumberyard — steps away
• Nevada State Children’s Home — 0.5 mi
• Nevada’s Capital — 0.8 mi
• State Printing Building — 0.8 mi