Verdi

Verdi was born of timber and named on a whim. When the Central Pacific reached this point on the Truckee in 1868, railroad man Charles Crocker named the new town for the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi—though locals have always said it "VUR-dye." The Crystal Peak Company built sawmills here that fed Sierra lumber to the railroad and the booming towns beyond, and the town ran on wood for decades. Mills, fire, and changing fortunes thinned it out, and Verdi settled into a quiet western edge of the Reno area. The river and railroad still run through it.

What the plaque says

Modern Verdi came into being with the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad through Nevada in 1867-’69. It became a major mill town and terminal for shipment of ties and construction timbers with a network of logging railways reaching into the timber north and west of here. In 1860, a log bridge was built across the Truckee River near where Verdi is now located. Known as O’Neils Crossing, the site served as a stage stop during the 1860’s on the heavily travelled Henness Pass Turnpike and Toll Road and the Dutch Flat and Donner Lake Road. In 1864, the Crystal Peak Company laid out a town on the site some two miles from Verdi’s present location. The company owned mining and lumber interests near the settlement which was then called Crystal Peak. Verdi remained an active lumbering center into the twentieth century due to the exertions of men like Oliver Lonkey of the Verdi Lumber Company. A disastrous fire in 1928 plus depletion of timber reserves resulted in Verdi’s decline.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 9.6 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Donner Memorial State Park — 18 mi
  Where the Donner Party spent the winter of 1846, marked by cabin stone and a monument built to a remembered snow depth.
• Sand Harbor — 22 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
• Donner Summit Tunnels — 22 mi
  Granite bored by hand at fourteen inches a day, by Chinese crews the country spent a century forgetting.

More markers nearby

• The Great Train Robbery — 0.3 mi
• Truckee River West — 3.1 mi
• Governor Emmet Derby Boyle — 8.0 mi
• Historic Transportation — 8.6 mi