Mound House

Mound House existed to move freight from one railroad to another. It was a station on the Virginia and Truckee line and the terminus of the narrow-gauge Carson and Colorado, which meant goods riding up from the south on the slim-gauge tracks had to be transferred here to the wider V&T. That made the junction a busy bottleneck in the 1880s, a place defined entirely by the meeting of two gauges of track. The railroads are long gone, but the spot east of Carson City still carries the name and sits at a working crossroads.

What the plaque says

Mound House was located one-half mile north of this point. Originally constructed in 1871 as a station and siding on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, it served for some time simply as a wood and water stop. In 1877, a post office was established. Mound House came into its own in 1880, when the V and T began construction of a narrow-gauge railroad from here to the mining camps of western Nevada and the Owens Valley region of California. Named the Carson and Colorado, it turned Mound House into a booming shipping point. The Southern Pacific Railroad purchased the C and C from the V and T in 1900, just prior to the Tonopah silver strike. In 1905, the Southern Pacific built a short line from its new station at Hazen, on the main line, to intersect the C and C at Fort Churchill. The Hazen cutoff took most of the booming Tonopah-Goldfield business away from the V and T. From 1900 to 1920, extensive gypsum mining and milling operations, to produce plaster, were carried on immediately northwest of Mound House. The narrow-gauge line was abandoned from Mound House to Fort Churchill in 1934 and the V and T track from Carson City to Virginia City in 1938. Within a few years, Mound House had disappeared.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 6.2 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 — 6.2 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
• Virginia City — 6.7 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
• Stewart Indian School — 8.1 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

• Empire and the Carson River Mills — 2.7 mi
• Silver City School House — 3.9 mi
• Devil’s Gate — 3.9 mi
• Dayton Cemetery — 4.1 mi