Silver City School House

Silver City sat at the bottom of the grade below Virginia City, the staging town where ore wagons, stables, and corrals served the Comstock mines just up the canyon. By 1861 some twelve hundred people lived here among four hotels, a dozen stores, and saloons, and the town built one of the lode's first steam quartz mills. The schoolhouse marked here served those families through the boom years. When the Virginia and Truckee Railroad bypassed the town in 1869, the freight business collapsed. Around a hundred people remain, with historic buildings still in use.

What the plaque says

The growing town of Silver City built a schoolhouse at this site in 1867-1868. Enrollment was as high as 166 students during the 1880s. Children were educated here for nearly a century until the school closed in 1958. The building then began its career as the Silver City community center and volunteer fire department. The fire department parked trucks inside the south classroom. Community events took place in the north classroom. Fire destroyed the schoolhouse in 2004. The community center was built in 2007 on the same place. The new building closely resembles the old schoolhouse in size and architectural style. Materials from the original building are incorporated into the new structure.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 2.7 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 — 3.2 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 — 9.7 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 — 12 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

• Devil’s Gate — 0.2 mi
• McCones’ Foundries — 2.5 mi
• Chollar Mine — 2.7 mi
• Savage Mansion (1861) — 2.9 mi