The Warm Springs Hotel and Nevada State Prison

Carson City's prison began as a hotel. Abe Curry built the crude Warm Springs Hotel a mile east of town, and when Nevada Territory organized in 1861 the legislature leased it as a meeting hall—then converted it into the territorial prison, naming Curry its first warden. The sandstone quarried by inmates here built much of early Carson City, from the Capitol to the Mint to the churches. The state bought the property outright, and it remains part of the Nevada prison system today, one of the oldest continuously operating prisons in the American West.

What the plaque says

Built near this site around 1860, Nevada’s first Territorial Legislature met in the Warm Springs Hotel in 1861. Abraham Curry, noted entrepreneur and co-founder of Carson City, built the hotel from hand-hewn sandstone taken from the quarry southeast of here, now inside the old Nevada State Prison complex. An imposing edifice in its day, the hotel was one of several buildings throughout Carson constructed of this unique sandstone. The sandstone quarry remained a significant piece of the prison’s operation from the 1860s to the 1950s as prisoners cut stone for prison buildings and for other nearby state facilities, such as the State Capitol and the U.S. Mint, now the Nevada State Museum. Prison administrators hoped that work in the quarry, or the prison farm three miles south, would rehabilitate prisoners to return to society. In 1862, Abe Curry leased a portion of the hotel to the Nevada Territory to hold prisoners. Two years later, the State of Nevada purchased the property for use as a prison. The title to the property was disputed for years afterwards and finally settled by the Legislature in 1879. During 1867, a fire destroyed the portion of the hotel the state purchased from Curry. After the fire, the State of Nevada rebuilt the prison campus, beginning a tradition of redeveloping the prison that continued into the 1980s. The prison continued to operate until 2012 and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — 1.5 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 — 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 — 8.8 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 — 11 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

• Trans-Sierran Pioneer Flight — 0.9 mi
• Corbett-Fitzsimmon Flight — 1.1 mi
• Nevada State Children’s Home — 1.4 mi
• Charles W. Friend House, Observatory & Weather Station — 1.4 mi