Glenbrook

Glenbrook existed to feed the Comstock's appetite for wood. Lumbering on this shore of Lake Tahoe began in 1861, and in 1873 Duane Bliss consolidated operations into the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company—the largest wood combine the lode ever had. It controlled more than fifty thousand acres of timber, ran sawmills and two steam tugs that towed log rafts across the lake, and employed five hundred men. Before the timber gave out and the company closed in 1898, it had stripped roughly seven hundred fifty million board feet from the basin. The town is now a resort.

What the plaque says

Lumbering operations in the Glenbrook area of Lake Tahoe began in 1861. Consolidation of V-Flume systems in and near Clear Creek Canyon by 1872 made it possible to float lumber, cordwood, and sawed material from Spooner’s Summit to Carson City and to eliminate wagon hauling over the 9-year old Lake Bigler Toll Road (Kings Canyon Road). In 1873, the new Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, under Duane Bliss, assumed all operations, becoming the largest Comstock wood and lumber combine. It controlled over 50,000 acres of timberland, operating 2 to 4 sawmills, 2 Tahoe Lake steam tugs to tow logs, 2 logging railroads, the logging camps employing 500 men, and a planing mill and box factory in Carson City. Timber depletion and reduced Comstock mining closed the company in 1898; it had taken 750,000,000 board feet of lumber and 500,000 cords of wood from the Tahoe Basin Forests during its lifetime. State Historic Landmark No.219 Division of Historic Preservation and Archeology Victor O. Goodwin.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 0.4 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 2.4 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 6.7 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
• Genoa — 7.4 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

More markers nearby

• Spooner Area (Logging and Lumbering Period: 1868- 1895) — 2.2 mi
• De Ek Wadapush - Cave Rock — 2.5 mi
• Spooner Summit — 3.0 mi
• Washoe Indians — 5.1 mi