Mackay Mansion

This house tracks two fortunes. Built around 1860 as the Gould & Curry mine office and superintendent's residence, its first occupant was George Hearst, whose Comstock start seeded a dynasty—his son would build Hearst Castle and a newspaper empire. Its more famous resident came later: John Mackay, an Irish immigrant who arrived a penniless miner and rose to be the richest man the Comstock ever produced, one of the four Bonanza Kings behind the 1873 Big Bonanza. It survived the 1875 fire. Today it's a museum, vault and Victorian furnishings intact.

What the plaque says

Once owned by John Mackay, this elegant mansion also served as the office for the Gould & Curry Mining Company. Mackay, an Irish-born immigrant, was the richest man the Comstock ever produced. Built in the 1860s, when George Heart played an important role in the company, this building became the headquarters for Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O’Brian — “Silver Kings” of the Comstock.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 0.2 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 — 0.3 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
• Carson City — 12 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 — 14 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

• Savage Mansion (1861) — steps away
• Mark Twain — 0.2 mi
• The Great Fire of 1875 — 0.3 mi
• African Americans and the Boston Saloon — 0.3 mi