Huffaker’s

Granville Huffaker brought cattle here before there was a Reno. He drove some five hundred head from Salt Lake City around 1858 and settled along Thomas Creek south of the Truckee, founding one of the largest of the scattered settlements that dotted the Truckee Meadows before statehood. By 1864 Huffaker's had a few hundred residents, a post office, hotels, and later its own stop on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad. Huffaker built a one-room school in 1867 on land he donated. The town faded as Reno rose, but the restored Huffaker School survives at Bartley Ranch Regional Park.

What the plaque says

Before the arrival, 1858, of Granville W. Huffaker driving 500 head of cattle into the Truckee Meadows, the principal settlers were Mormon. The Comstock Lode and its mining needs focused attention on the valley. Huffaker established his ranch in 1859. Langton's Stage Line and the first Post Office were functioning by 1862. For ten years Huffaker's was a most active stage-stop and a center for a community. The school house was constructed in 1868. Bachelors of a jolly nature gathered here for dancing, horse-racing and "land squabbles". The Athenian Literary Society flourished for the more cultured. In 1875 the "Bonanza Kings" completed their Pacific Lumber and Flume operation from the Lake Tahoe Basin. For fifteen miles trestled logs were propelled "by waters rushing faster than any train." At the terminus of the flume, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad opened a depot and telegraph office and constructed a spur where workers transferred timbers.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 6.4 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
• Virginia City — 11 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 — 12 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
• Sand Harbor — 19 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

• Emigrant-Donner Camp — 2.6 mi
• Moana Springs — 3.8 mi
• Steamboat Springs — 4.5 mi
• Geiger Station — 5.4 mi