Historic Flume and Lumberyard

This was the bottom end of a remarkable timber chute. Lumber and cordwood cut in the forests above Lake Tahoe were floated down an eleven-mile V-flume from Spooner Summit through Clear Creek Canyon to a vast lumberyard here on the south edge of Carson City. From this terminus the Virginia and Truckee Railroad carried the wood on to the Comstock, where the mines swallowed timber by the millions of board feet. The flume and yard turned Carson City into the marshaling point for Tahoe's forests. The Nevada State Railroad Museum now occupies part of the old lumberyard ground.

What the plaque says

Approximately one-half mile south of this point and west of the present highway lay the immense lumberyard of the Carson-Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company, the greatest of the Comstock lumbering combines operating in the Lake Tahoe Basin during 1870-1898. Situated at the terminus of the 12 – mile “V” flume from Spooners Summit in the Sierra Nevada, the lumberyard was approximately one mile long and one-half mile wide. A spur line of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad served the lumberyard. The spur ran adjacent to this site and carried rough lumber to the company’s planing mill and box factory, one-half mile north on Stewart Street. It also carried timbers and cordwood to the Carson Yards to be hauled to the Comstock mines and mills.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — 0.8 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 — 2.4 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.4 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
• Sand Harbor — 9.3 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Gardner’s Ranch — steps away
• Nevada State Children’s Home — 0.6 mi
• State Printing Building — 0.8 mi
• Nevada’s Capital — 0.8 mi