Nevada’s Birthplace

This is the other half of the argument Dayton makes downriver. In the spring of 1851 John Reese led a party from the Utah Territory to a meadow on the Carson River and built a permanent trading post, selling supplies to emigrants bound over the Sierra. Mormon settlers called it Mormon Station; in 1855 Orson Hyde renamed it Genoa, for Columbus's birthplace. With the territory's first post office, courthouse, and newspaper, Genoa holds the firmest claim to being Nevada's first town. The reconstructed station stands as a state park, and the 1853 saloon still pours.

What the plaque says

Carson Valley is the birthplace of Nevada. By 1851, people settled at a place they called Mormon Station, renamed Genoa in 1856. With the early establishment of a post office and local government, the community can lay claim to the title of "Nevada's First Town." Thousands of immigrants moved over the old road skirting the west bank of the Carson River as they prepared to cross the Sierra, feeding their livestock on grass cut along the river. At Genoa; at Mottsville, settled in 1852; and at Sheridan, settled by Moses Job about '54; emigrants stopped to enjoy produce of the region's first gardens. Pony Express riders used this route in 1860, switching a year later to the shorter Daggett Trail, now Kingsbury Grade.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 3.6 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 — 8.5 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 — 9.6 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 — 11 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

• Boyd Toll Road — 0.6 mi
• Walley’s Hot Springs — 3.0 mi
• Minden — 3.1 mi
• Cradlebaugh Bridge — 3.5 mi