Site of Nevada’s First Public Library

Nevada's first public library opened near here, a civic milestone for a young railroad town still better known for saloons than reading rooms. In an era when a frontier community's claim to permanence rested on its institutions—courthouse, school, church, library—a free public collection of books signaled that Reno meant to be a city, not just a stop on the line. The library grew with the town it served. The original building is gone, but the institution it began endures in the Washoe County library system, marked here near Reno's founding ground on the Truckee.

What the plaque says

In 1895, Washoe County District Attorney, Frank H. Norcross, later a Chief Justice of the Nevada Supreme Court and a Federal Judge, began a drive to establish Nevada’s first free public library in Reno. That year, he persuaded the Nevada Legislature to enact a law establishing Nevada’s public libraries. The state’s first public library building was erected on this site in 1904, with $15,000 donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie on land originally donated to the City of Reno by pioneer Myron C. Lake. It remained in service until 1930, when growth forced its relocation to the site where the Pioneer Theater Auditorium now stands. The library was sold for $1 and demolished in 1931. In 1966, the library was relocated to a new building at Center and Liberty Streets, three blocks south of this site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — steps away
  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 — 24 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
• Reno — steps away
• Lake Mansion Home of Myron C. Lake Founder of Reno 1877 — 0.3 mi
• N.C.O. Railroad Depot – 1910 — 0.4 mi