Stewart Indian School

Opened in 1890, Stewart was the only off-reservation Indian boarding school in Nevada, named for Senator William Stewart, who secured its funding. Its purpose was assimilation: children of the Washoe, Paiute, and Western Shoshone—and later dozens of other tribes—were removed from their families, forbidden to speak their languages, and drilled in English and trades. Student apprentices built the campus's distinctive colored-stone buildings. Some thirty thousand children passed through before it closed in 1980. The campus is now a cultural center and museum run to tell that history honestly and to help families heal.

What the plaque says

1890 – 1980. Originally known as the Carson Indian Training School. Stewart Indian School, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, provided vocational training and academic education for American Indian students from throughout the west for nearly a century. W.D.C. Gibson, the first superintendent, renamed the boarding school in honor of U.S. Senator William Morris Stewart of Nevada, the principal figure in obtaining Congressional authorization and funding for the institution. In the early 1920’s Superintendent Frederick Snyder initiated a building program. Students worked with stone masons, some of American Indian ancestry, to construct the handsome stone structures that still grace the grounds

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stewart Indian School — steps away
  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
• Carson City — 3.2 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
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 8.7 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
• Genoa — 9.2 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it

More markers nearby

• Dat-So-La-Lee — steps away
• Eagle Valley — 0.8 mi
• Historic Flume and Lumberyard — 2.4 mi
• Gardner’s Ranch — 2.5 mi