State Printing Building

A state has to print its own laws, journals, and ballots, and for decades Nevada did it here. The State Printing Building housed the official printing office that turned out the statutes, legislative records, and public documents of a young, far-flung state—work that bound the government together across enormous distances. In an era when a printed page was the only way to carry a law from the capital to a county courthouse, the state printer was a quiet but essential office. The building remains part of Carson City's historic civic core near the Capitol.

What the plaque says

Completed in 1886, the State Printing Building is the second oldest structure built by the State within the Capitol Complex. Architects Morrill J. Curtis and Seymore Pixley, designed the Italianate structure to compliment the older State Capitol (1870). Curtis was responsible for many significant buildings throughout Nevada and the West, including the octagonal library annex to the rear of the State Capitol (1906). Like many important structures in Carson City, this building is constructed of sandstone ashlar quarried at the nearby State Prison and is a significant example of state governmental architecture for the period. From 1886 to 1964, the building housed the offices and presses of the State Printer. State Historic Marker No. 250 , Division of Historic Preservation and Archeology , Nevada State Library , Division of Archives and Records.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — steps away
  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 — 3.2 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.3 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Sand Harbor — 9.2 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

• Charles W. Friend House, Observatory & Weather Station — steps away
• Nevada’s Capital — steps away
• Carson City — steps away
• Rinckel Mansion — steps away