Mottsville

Mottsville claims a quiet armful of Nevada firsts. Settled in 1851 by the Mott family, it became home to Eliza Mott, who in 1854 opened her kitchen to valley children and so became the territory's first schoolteacher—milking cows and packing her students' lunches before the school day began. The settlement also hosted the valley's first court session and one of its earliest cemeteries. It never grew into a city; it was a pioneer farm community that did the unglamorous work of putting down roots. The Mottsville name endures on the valley's quiet west side south of Genoa.

What the plaque says

This is the site of the settlement on the Emigrant Trail known as Mottsville, where Hiram Mott and his son Israel settled in 1851. Their homestead was the scene of an impressive number of firsts in Carson County, Utah Territory: 1851: Israel Mott's wife, Eliza Ann Middaugh, was the first white woman settler. 1854: Mrs. Israel Mott opened the first school in her kitchen. The Mott's second child, Louisa Beatrice, was the first white girl child to be born. 1856: Judge W.W. Drummond held the first session of the United States District Court of the Third District of Utah Territory in the Mott barn built in 1855. 1857: The third child of the Motts died and was buried in the yard. This tiny grave was the first in what became the first cemetery. The cemetery, 300 feet east, is all that marks the site of Mottsville today. (Cemetery located 500 feet east).

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 5.1 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 9.9 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 — 12 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
• 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

• Sheridan — 2.2 mi
• Kingsbury Grade — 2.4 mi
• Walley’s Hot Springs — 3.5 mi
• Carson Valley — 3.6 mi