Reno

Reno began as a toll bridge. C.W. Fuller threw a log span across the Truckee in 1859 to charge travelers bound for the Comstock; Myron Lake bought him out in 1863 and made Lake's Crossing pay. When the Central Pacific pushed its transcontinental line through in 1868, Lake deeded land for a depot, and the railroad auctioned the first town lots that May—naming the place for Jesse Lee Reno, a Union general killed in the Civil War. The railroad made it a trade hub; the lenient divorce laws later made it famous. Reno is still the Biggest Little City.

What the plaque says

Before the arrival of the European Americans, the Washoe and Paiute people inhabited the Truckee Meadows. The Stevens-Murphy emigrant party passed through the area in 1844, and settlement began in the early 1850s. Charles William Fuller established a river ferry across the Truckee in the fall of 1859 and completed a bridge and a hotel by the spring of 1860. Myron C. Lake acquired Fuller's holdings in 1861, rebuilt the bridge and established Lake's Crossing. In 1868, Lake offered land for a depot to the Central Pacific Railroad and the town was laid out. The community's name honors a Civil War officer, General Jesse Lee Reno. Reno's transcontinental railroad connection and its rail link to the Comstock Lode helped lay the foundation for the economy, as did the lumber industry and the surrounding ranches and farms. The community's reputation as a divorce center began in 1906 and gambling was legalized in 1931.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 0.2 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 — 17 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 — 18 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 — 23 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

• Frederik Joseph DeLongchamps — steps away
• Site of Nevada’s First Public Library — steps away
• Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877 — 0.2 mi
• N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910 — 0.5 mi