Kingsbury Grade

When the Comstock boomed, the quickest way from California to the silver was straight over the mountains, and this toll road built in 1859 and 1860 cut the route. The grade climbs from the Carson Valley over Daggett Pass toward Lake Tahoe, a shorter line than the older wagon roads to the south. Pony Express riders switched to it in 1861. For decades freight wagons, stages, and travelers paid to grind up its switchbacks. The modern highway still climbs Kingsbury Grade over Daggett Pass, one of the steepest paved routes into the Tahoe Basin.

What the plaque says

Dagget Pass Trail, named for C.D. Dagget, who acquired land at its foot in 1854, was earlier called Georgetown Trail. Replaced in 1860 by the wagon road built by Kingsbury and McDonald, for which they received a Territorial Franchise in 1861, it shortened the distance between Sacramento and Virginia City by 15 miles. The road cost $585,000. Toll receipts were $190,000 in 1863. Heavy eastward travel occurred in 1860 to 1868. The toll for a wagon and four horses was $17.50 round trip from Shingle Springs, California, to Henry Van Sickle's Station near the foot of the grade. Van Sickle, who helped finance the road, eventually acquired it and sold it to Douglas County in 1889 for $1000. Horse-drawn water carts sprinkled summer dust, and sleds packed winter snow, providing a year-round hard-surfaced road. Pony Express and the line of the Humboldt and Salt Lake Telegraph Company followed Kingsbury Grade.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 2.7 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 8.1 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 9.9 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back
• Stewart Indian School — 11 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

• Walley’s Hot Springs — 1.1 mi
• Carson Valley — 2.1 mi
• Mottsville — 2.4 mi
• Boyd Toll Road — 3.6 mi