Tonopah

Tonopah ended a twenty-year slump in a single strike. In May 1900 Jim Butler, the Nye County district attorney, found silver at a spring the Shoshone had named Tonopah, and the rush pulled Nevada out of the doldrums the Comstock's decline had left behind. The town became the richest silver producer in the country, took the county seat from Belmont in 1905, and grew to ten thousand people with its own railroad and mills. The mines slowed in the 1920s, but Tonopah had already launched the careers — and fortunes — of men who would run the state.

What the plaque says

To Jim Butler, District Attorney of Nye County, goes the credit for making the ore discoveries which ended the twenty-year slump in Nevada's economy. Migratory Indian bands originally applied the name Tonopah to a small spring in the nearby San Antonio Mountains, long before Butler camped in this area in May of 1900. Tonopah became the richest silver producer in the nation and replaced Belmont as the county seat in 1905. The mines spawned a railroad, several huge mills and a busting population of approximately 10,000. The mines faltered in the 'Twenties', but Tonopah has achieved permanent fame because of the prominent financial and political leaders it produced. Many camps and communities followed in the wake of Tonopah's boom. Most of which have become ghost towns.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tonopah — steps away
  The Queen of the Silver Camps — the 1900 strike that saved Nevada, and the one boom town that never became a ghost: a mine you can walk into, a grand hotel, a clown motel, and the darkest skies in America.
• Goldfield — 25 mi
  Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.

More markers nearby

• Millers — 13 mi
• Southern Nevada Telephone – Telegraph Company Building — 25 mi
• Goldfield — 25 mi
• Blair — 29 mi