Union Hotel & Post Office

The first Pony Express remount in this area was at Spafford Hall's station; when riders needed a second site, it moved to this spot, where the Union Hotel now stands. The building anchors Dayton's Old Town commercial row, the kind of stone-and-frame structure that survived while flashier Comstock towns burned and emptied. It housed travelers and the post office both, the twin functions that kept a river town alive between mining booms. Still standing on Main Street, it remains one of the most photographed buildings on the Dayton walking tour.

What the plaque says

The original Union Hotel was located across the street. It was rebuilt here in 1870 after a fire destroyed the old hotel. The former post office site originally housed the dining room and barber shop. The freestanding rock wall is the original wall of the Overland Stage Station and Pony Express stop. "Private property not open to the public".

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 5.6 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 — 6.0 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 — 11 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 — 12 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

• Nevada’s First Gold Discovery — steps away
• Dayton — steps away
• Dayton Chinatown — steps away
• Hall’s Station — steps away