Junction House

This ranch began as the first permanent settlement in the Truckee Meadows. In the 1850s a trading post rose where roads met—the route from Virginia City to Washoe Valley crossing the road from California to Oregon—and the junction gave the place its name and its livelihood as a busy stage and station stop. Governor John Sparks bought it in 1887, named it the Alamo Ranch, and built a fine house there; he later lent his name to the railroad town nearby. The site has been continuously occupied ever since, now home to the Atlantis casino resort south of Reno.

What the plaque says

Here was located one of the busiest crossroads of pioneer Nevada, converging point for many major toll roads of the area. The earliest emigrants from the east crossed through Truckee Meadows at this point and by 1853 the intersection was known as Junction House, first permanent settlement in this valley and a stopping place for thousands. Junction House, later called Andersons, was a station for such toll roads of the 1860's as the turnpike to Washoe City, the Myron Lake road to Oregon, the Geiger roads to Virginia City and the important Henness Pass route to California. Governor Sparks bought the property in the late 1890's and more recently it belonged to cattleman William Moffat.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 2.8 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 — 15 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 — 15 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 — 21 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

• Moana Springs — 0.3 mi
• Virginia and Truckee Railroad Right-of-Way — 2.0 mi
• Emigrant-Donner Camp — 2.4 mi
• Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877 — 2.6 mi