Sparks

Sparks is a town the railroad built on purpose. When the Southern Pacific straightened its line across the desert in 1902, it abandoned Wadsworth as a division point and chose swampland east of Reno for a new one—hauling in tens of thousands of carloads of gravel to raise the ground. In 1904 the railroad moved its shops here and offered workers lots for a dollar, even freighting their Wadsworth houses over whole. The new town wanted a name; after Harriman declined the honor, it took Governor John Sparks's. Long a company railroad town, Sparks is now Nevada's fifth-largest city.

What the plaque says

Engaged in straightening and realigning the old Central Pacific trackage across Nevada, the Southern Pacific Company moved its shops and headquarters from Wadsworth to this location in 1904. The railroad set aside five city blocks for its employees' residences. Each railroader paid $1.00 for a lot. They had to build a house within 120 days and file their deed of ownership. The company also cut their houses in Wadsworth into sections, loaded the parts on train cars and shipped the houses free of charge to Sparks. The railroad moved its employees, their house and personal items on July 4, 1904. Sparks, originally known as East Reno, New Town Tract and Harriman, came into official existence. In 1905, the state legislature incorporated the town, named it in honor of John Sparks, rancher and governor of the state of Nevada. Sparks boasted one of the largest roundhouses in the world during the steam era, the Nevada base for a vast stable of steam locomotives. The famous cab-in-front locomotive type known as Mallets, were the huge steamers hauling both freight and passengers over the steep grades of the Sierra Nevada between Roseville, California and Sparks.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 2.6 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 — 17 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 — 25 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

• Glendale School (1864- 1958) — 0.7 mi
• Chinese in Nevada — 0.7 mi
• Southern Pacific Railroad Yards — 0.8 mi
• Coney Island — 0.8 mi