Hall’s Station

Before there was a Dayton there was Hall's Station. Andrew Spafford Hall of Indiana built a trading post on the bank of Gold Creek around 1852 to supply the emigrants and placer miners working the canyon, and his name became the first label for this particular spot. On New Year's Eve in 1853 the post hosted a dance—nine women and roughly a hundred and fifty men, a fair measure of who was here. The station later served as an early Pony Express stop. A marker in Old Town recalls the post that seeded the town.

What the plaque says

Spafford Hall built this station and trading post in the early 1850's to accommodate emigrants bound for California. Hall, who was the first permanent settler, was severely injured in a hunting accident in 1854 and sold the station to one of his employees, James McMarlin, after which it became known as McMarlin's Station. Major Ormsby bought the station sometime between 1854 and 1860: The title was still in his name in 1860 when he was killed in the first Battle of the Pyramid Lake Indian War. A special niche in Nevada's history is accorded this site as the place where the first recorded dance was held on New Year's Eve, 1853. Exact site destroyed by borrow pit.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 5.5 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
• Virginia City — 5.9 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
• Carson City — 11 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 — 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

More markers nearby

• Nevada’s First Gold Discovery — steps away
• Union Hotel & Post Office — steps away
• Dayton School House – 1865 — steps away
• Dayton — steps away