McCones’ Foundries

The mines pulled the silver out; foundries like this made the iron that let them. In 1862 Ivy Mead, John McCone, and a partner set up a foundry, later moving it here into a granite building. McCone took sole ownership, rebuilt after an 1872 fire, and grew it into possibly the largest foundry in Nevada, employing a hundred and ten men. It cast the early ironwork for the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, and in 1880 poured the largest single casting yet made on the Pacific Coast. The unglamorous industry beneath the boom.

What the plaque says

In 1862, Ivy Mead, John McCone, and Mr. Tascar established a foundry at Johntown, two miles south east of here in Gold Canyon. After two years they moved their operation to this point and erected a large granite building. John McCone became the sole proprietor of the foundry in 1866. A fire on May 15, 1872 left nothing standing but the walls of the foundry. McCone then bought a Fulton Foundry built in Virginia City in 1863. McCone made it possibly the largest foundry in the state. The foundry manufactured all the early castings of the Virginia and Truckee Railway. He employed 110 men at it's peak. The largest casting (in its time) poured on the Pacific Coast was made at Fulton's on December 11, 1880

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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
• Virginia City — 0.8 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
• Carson City — 11 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

• Chollar Mine — 0.3 mi
• Savage Mansion (1861) — 0.5 mi
• Mackay Mansion — 0.6 mi
• Mark Twain — 0.8 mi