Goldfield

For a few roaring years after gold turned up in 1902, Goldfield was the biggest city in Nevada—fifteen, maybe twenty thousand people, the last great rush in the West. George Wingfield and George Nixon consolidated the richest mines and grew enormously wealthy; the district threw off tens of millions in gold. Then it thinned fast: decline by 1910, a flood, and a 1923 fire that burned much of downtown. Today the grand Goldfield Hotel and the Tiffany-lit county courthouse preside over a town of a few hundred.

What the plaque says

For a twenty-year period prior to 1900, mining in Nevada fell into a slump that cast the entire state into a bleak depression and caused the loss of a third of the population. The picture brightened overnight following the spectacular strikes in Tonopah and, shortly afterwards, in Goldfield. Gold ore was discovered here in December 1902 by two Nevada-born prospectors, Harry Stimler and Billy Marsh. From 1904 to 1918, Goldfield boomed. The city had a railroad that connected to Las Vegas and a peak population of 20,000, making it Nevada’s largest community at the time. Between 1903 and 1940 a total of $86,765,044 in precious metals was produced here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Goldfield — steps away
  Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.
• Tonopah — 25 mi
  The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.

More markers nearby

• Southern Nevada Telephone – Telegraph Company Building — steps away
• Gold Point — 19 mi
• Blair — 23 mi
• Lida — 23 mi