Savage Mansion (1861)

Most mine buildings were strictly business; this one had a balcony fit for a president. Built around 1861 in the French Second Empire style, it served double duty—the Savage Mining Company's office on the ground floor, the superintendent's residence above. Its proudest moment came on October 27, 1879, when former president Ulysses Grant, fresh off a world tour and a parade in his honor, addressed the people of Virginia City from the second-floor balcony. The mine is long quiet, but the elegant mansard-roofed building still stands on D Street.

What the plaque says

This elegant mansion, designed in the French Second Empire style, served as a residence for the superintendent, as well as a mine office for the Savage Mining Company. The first floor served as the mine office while the upper two stories provided a residence for many successful superintendents. Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and “General of the Armies,” spoke to the townspeople from the second floor balcony on October 27, 1879, after a town parade in his honor.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 0.2 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
• Virginia City — 0.3 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
• Carson City — 12 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 — 14 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

• Mackay Mansion — steps away
• Chollar Mine — 0.2 mi
• Mark Twain — 0.3 mi
• The Great Fire of 1875 — 0.4 mi