Minden

Minden was a town built on purpose, and on schedule. When the Virginia and Truckee Railroad pushed its branch into the Carson Valley, it needed a terminal, and in 1906 the company laid out Minden as a planned railroad and ranching town—orderly streets around a central park, a creamery, and shipping yards for the valley's hay and cattle. The plan worked so well that in 1916 Minden took the Douglas County seat from fading Genoa. The V&T is gone, but Minden remains the county seat, its turn-of-the-century town park still at the center.

What the plaque says

Minden, the seat of Douglas County since 1916, was named for a town in Westphalia, Germany, where the founder of the D.F. Dangberg Land and Live Stock Company, was born in 1829. The company established Minden in 1905 to provide terminal facilities for the Virginia and Truckee Railway, which was then extending a branch line southward from Carson City. The passenger and freight depot was situated at this point. Principle promoter of the town, and its related development, was H.F. Dangberg, Jr. Secretary of the Company and son of the founder. State Historical Marker No. 130 Nevada State Park System Carson Valley Historical Society.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 5.8 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
• 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 12 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 — 13 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

More markers nearby

• Gardnerville — 1.1 mi
• Boyd Toll Road — 2.6 mi
• Nevada’s Birthplace — 3.1 mi
• Kingsbury Grade — 4.3 mi