Geiger Station

Geiger Station was the busiest stop on a hard climb. The Geiger Grade toll road, opened in 1862, hauled people and freight up the steep route between the Truckee Meadows and the Comstock at Virginia City, and this station sat at its heart—where teamsters rested their animals and the road's traffic gathered. The grade was the main link between the valley below and the silver towns above for decades. The old toll road was replaced by a gentler highway in 1936. The marker recalls the station that served the wagons and stages on the long pull to the mines.

What the plaque says

Seven-tenths of a mile east of this marker was Geiger's Station, the largest station on the Geiger Grade Toll Road, the main thoroughfare between the Comstock Lode and the ranches of the Truckee Meadows. Located at the site were a toll house, three blacksmith shops, three barns, several corrals and an inn named Magnolia House. During the boom years of the Comstock Lode, the 1860s and 1870s, the station was crowded with freight outfits, stagecoaches, and weary teamsters. Passing travelers could stop off at the inn for a drink or a quick meal. Following the extension of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad to Reno in August 1872, the toll road fell into disuse, and a few years later it became a public highway. Magnolia House continued operating until 1915. Social activity at the inn included dances, attracting residents from Virginia City, nearby valleys, and the Truckee Meadows.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 5.8 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 — 6.2 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 — 12 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
• Carson City — 15 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

More markers nearby

• Steamboat Springs — 1.4 mi
• Old Geiger Grade — 2.6 mi
• Huffaker’s — 5.4 mi
• Galena — 5.5 mi