Nevada State Children’s Home

Nevada began caring for its parentless children here. The state opened an orphans' asylum on Prison Road in 1873, one of the first such public institutions in the young state. After fire destroyed it in 1902, it was rebuilt the next year as a grand three-story sandstone building from the prison quarry, one wing for boys and one for girls. Renamed the Nevada State Children's Home in 1951 and known as Sunny Acres, it sheltered children until cottages replaced it, and finally closed in 1989. The old gymnasium, once a schoolhouse, is the last original building on the site.

What the plaque says

The Nevada Orphan’s Asylum, a privately funded institution, was opened in Virginia City May 1867 by Sister Frederica McGrath and two other nuns of the Sisters of Charity. By 1870, most of its functions were taken over by the Nevada Orphans’ Home at Carson City, authorized in 1869 by the Legislature and constructed on this site. The first child admitted October 26, 1870. In 1903, the first building gave way to a larger one, constructed of sandstone from the State Prison Quarry east of Carson City. This edifice, a Carson landmark, served until 1963 as Nevada’s Home for Dependent and Neglected Children. In the 1940’s its name was changed to The Nevada State Children’s Home. During the 1950’s, the name “Sunny Acres” was also used. The stone building was in turn replaced in 1963, in accordance with the modern concept of family-sized groups housed in cottages. Commemorating a Century of State Service to the Children of Nevada .

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — 0.3 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
• Stewart Indian School — 3.0 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.4 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Sand Harbor — 9.3 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

• State Printing Building — 0.3 mi
• Charles W. Friend House, Observatory & Weather Station — 0.3 mi
• Nevada’s Capital — 0.3 mi
• Carson City — 0.3 mi