Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877

The name on this house is misleading in the best way. Myron Lake, the toll-bridge monopolist whose crossing became Reno, is rightly called the city's founder—but he never lived here. The ornate Italianate home was built in 1877 for the Marsh family; Lake bought it in 1879, and after his death his ex-wife Jane raised their son here. Lake's real monument is the city itself: he deeded the railroad its depot land and gave the ground for the Washoe County Courthouse. The much-moved mansion now stands preserved as one of Reno's oldest residences, a museum near the river.

What the plaque says

Built by Washington J. Marsh

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 0.3 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 — 17 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 — 18 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 — 23 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

• Reno — 0.2 mi
• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — 0.3 mi
• Site of Nevada’s First Public Library — 0.3 mi
• Virginia and Truckee Railroad Right-of-Way — 0.6 mi