Reuel Colt Gridley “Citizen Extraordinaire”

The stone store opened in 1863; the legend started the next year. Reuel Gridley lost an election bet and paid it by carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour down the street — then someone auctioned the sack for the Sanitary Fund and the winner handed it back to be sold again. Gridley spent a year doing exactly that, across Nevada, California, and St. Louis, raising some two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars one sack at a time. It ruined him; he died nearly penniless in 1870. Mark Twain, a boyhood friend, told the whole thing in Roughing It.

What the plaque says

This simple stone structure, opened to the public in late 1863, was originally operated as a general merchandise store by the firm of Gridley, Hobart and Jacobs. Gridley is best remembered for his 1864 wager which prompted the auctioning of a sack of flour for donations to the "Sanitary Fund," the Civil War forerunner of the American Red Cross. The flour was sold again and again throughout Nevada and California, then taken east and eventually auctioned at the St. Louis Sanitary Fair in 1864, in all raising about $275,000 for this fund. Gridley died almost penniless six years later. State Historic Marker No. 119 Division of Historic Preservation and Archeology Lander County Civic and Historic Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Austin — 0.4 mi
  A silver boomtown that hit ten thousand and fell to under two hundred — the living ghost town at the high middle of US-50
• Hickison Petroglyphs — 22 mi
  Western Shoshone rock art cut into soft white tuff at a 6,500-foot summit — the easiest rock art to meet on the loneliest road

More markers nearby

• Austin Churches — 0.4 mi
• International Hotel — 0.6 mi
• Stokes Castle — 0.9 mi
• Austin — 1.1 mi