Moana Springs

Reno took its leisure in hot water. Moana Springs, fed by natural geothermal flows south of downtown, became a popular resort and bathing plunge in the early twentieth century—a place where a railroad town could swim, soak, and gather on a summer day. A large indoor pool and grounds drew crowds for decades, part of the same geothermal endowment that warms so much of the Truckee Meadows. The resort eventually closed and the old plunge came down, but the name endures in Moana Lane and a municipal pool, marking where Reno once went to play in the warm water.

What the plaque says

Opened as a resort on October 29, 1905, Moana Springs took its name from a famous Hawaiian spa. In addition to a large bath house with a pool fed by hot springs, Moana had a stately hotel, a clubhouse, baseball diamond and picnic grounds. Constructed and initially operated by Charles T. Short, (who gave the resort its name), Al North and John N. Evans, Moana was acquired by Louis W . Berrum in 1913 and remained in his family for the next four decades. Served by Berrum's Nevada Interurban Trolley Line from 1907 to 1920, Moana hosted dances, rodeos, boxing matches, trapshoots, circuses and aviation exhibitions. The city of Reno purchased Moana in 1956 and the remaining buildings were demolished the next year to make way for a new recreational complex.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 2.6 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 — 15 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 — 15 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 — 21 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

• Virginia and Truckee Railroad Right-of-Way — 1.8 mi
• Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877 — 2.3 mi
• Reno — 2.4 mi
• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — 2.4 mi