The Comstock Lode

In 1859, prospectors chasing gold on the slope of Mount Davidson kept cursing a heavy blue-gray clay that fouled their tools—until someone assayed it and found it was nearly solid silver. That was the Comstock Lode, the first great silver strike in the country, and it built a state. The rush raised Virginia City almost overnight, the wealth helped bankroll the Union and rebuild San Francisco, and it pushed Nevada into statehood in 1864. The richest years faded by the late 1870s. The hills above town are still seamed with shafts and tailings.

What the plaque says

1864 – 1964. Near this spot was the heart of the Comstock Lode, the fabulous 2½ mile deposit of high-grade ore that produced nearly $400,000,000 in silver and gold. After the discovery in 1859, Virginia City boomed for 20 years, helped bring Nevada into the Union in 1864 and to build San Francisco. Seven major mines operated during the boom. Their sites are today marked by large yellow dumps, several which are visible from here – The Sierra Nevada, a mile to your left, the Union, Ophir, Con Virginia, and, on the high hill to the southeast, the Combination. The lode was worked from both ends, north up Cold Canyon and south from the Sierra Nevada and the Utah Mines.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 0.5 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
• Chollar Mine — 1.0 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
• 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 — 15 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

• Piper’s Opera House — 0.4 mi
• African Americans and the Boston Saloon — 0.4 mi
• The Great Fire of 1875 — 0.4 mi
• Mark Twain — 0.4 mi