Twelve Mile House

The name was a measure of distance: this hostelry stood twelve miles from Genoa and twelve from Cradlebaugh Bridge, a day's reckoning on the road south. Thomas Wheeler built it in 1860 at the point where the Boyd Toll Road from Genoa met the Cradlebaugh Toll Road from Carson City, the kind of junction where travelers naturally stopped for a bed and a meal. Beyond it the road ran on toward the Esmeralda mines. Way stations like this one anchored the toll-road network that moved people and freight across the valley before the railroads came.

What the plaque says

An important hostelry was so named because of its distance from Genoa and also from Cradlebaugh Bridge across the Carson River. It was built in 1860 by Thomas Wheeler, where the Boyd Toll Road to Genoa and the Cradlebaugh Toll Road to Carson City converged. In the vicinity a second station was built by James Teasdale. Twelve Mile House was an important stop on the road to the Esmeralda Mining Camp of Aurora. You still see buildings of the original station here.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 10 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
• 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
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 16 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 18 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back

More markers nearby

• Dresslerville — steps away
• Gardnerville — 3.3 mi
• Minden — 4.4 mi
• Luther Canyon (Fay Canyon) — 6.0 mi