Gardnerville

Gardnerville was the upstart that helped drain Genoa. It began in 1879 when Lawrence Gilman hauled the old Kent House hotel off the emigrant trail and set it on John Gardner's homestead, adding a blacksmith shop and saloon to serve farmers and the teamsters freighting produce to booming Bodie. If Genoa was the Mormon settlers' town, Gardnerville became the immigrants'—some eighteen hundred Danes founded their Valhalla Society here in 1885, and Basque shepherds followed, running tens of thousands of sheep in the valley. The town outgrew its parent and thrives today as a Carson Valley commercial center.

What the plaque says

Early Gardnerville served the farming community, and teamsters hauling local produce to booming Bodie. The first buildings were a blacksmith shop, a saloon, and the Gardnerville hotel. The latter was moved by Lawrence Gilman in 1879 from the emigrant trail between Genoa and Walley's Hot Springs, where it was known as Kent House, to this site, the homestead of John M. Gardner. Just as Genoa was the center for British (largely Mormon) settlers after 1851, so Gardnerville, after 1879, became the center for 1870 Danish immigrants. They founded the Valhall society in 1885 and met in Valhalla Hall one block south. Starting in 1898, Spanish and French Basque shepherds tended some 13,000 sheep in Carson Valley increasing to 25,000 by 1925, when the Basques began acquiring their own sheep and land. After 1918 several Basques in Gardnerville opened inns which flourished during the prohibition years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 6.8 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
• Stewart Indian School — 12 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 13 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 14 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

More markers nearby

• Minden — 1.1 mi
• Twelve Mile House — 3.3 mi
• Dresslerville — 3.4 mi
• Boyd Toll Road — 3.6 mi