Sutro

This town existed because of a hole in the mountain. Adolph Sutro spent years arguing that the Comstock mines needed a drainage tunnel to pull water and heat out from below, and in 1869 he began digging one four miles long into the base of Mount Davidson. The settlement at its mouth took his name. By the tunnel's completion in 1878 the great bonanzas were already fading, and Sutro's engineering triumph arrived a step behind the silver. The townsite sits below Virginia City, and the tunnel portal still marks where his great project began.

What the plaque says

Sutro was a town, a tunnel, and a man. The well-planned community was headquarters for the Sutro Drainage Tunnel. German-born Adolph Sutro came to the Comstock in 1860. He advocated a drainage tunnel, visualizing development of Comstock ore with this access. By 1865, his vision gained approval of state and federal legislation. However, the mining interests, having at first supported the tunnel, became strongly opposed. When construction began in 1869, it was first financed by the mine workers since the tunnel would presumably improve mine safety. Later, the funding came from international bankers. Miners completed the main tunnel in 1878 and then extended lateral excavations, providing drainage, ventilation and access to many Comstock mines. The work on the tunnel from its lower end created a town of 600-800 and boasted of a church, post office and its own weekly newspaper, plus Sutro’s Victorian mansion and other fine residences. Adolph Sutro soon sold his interest in the tunnel company and returned to San Francisco, where he served as mayor.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 4.3 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 — 4.5 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 — 12 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 — 14 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

• Camels in Dayton — 2.4 mi
• Courthouse Site 1865 – 1909 — 2.4 mi
• Dayton School House – 1865 — 2.5 mi
• Dayton — 2.5 mi