Austin is one of three major towns along a stretch of U.S. Highway 50, a route widely known as the Loneliest Road in America. Ely, the farthest east of the three, features many turn-of-the-twentieth-century buildings, a scenic train ride, and a railroad museum. West of Ely seventy-five miles is Eureka, which contains several photogenic buildings in a living town. Although those communities are historic and interesting, Austin, sixty-eight miles west of Eureka, is the only one with that elusive “ghost town feeling.”
One of the last frontiers of the American West, at least in its contiguous states, was the “Great Desert,” an area roughly extending from the Great Salt Lake to the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. It was inhabited by nomadic Indians and traversed principally by Pony Express riders, the Overland Stage, and emigrants heading west.
Along the Pony Express and Overland Stage route stood a stop called Jacob’s Spring, near the intermittently running Reese River. In 1862, apparently in search of a missing horse, William Talcott found a promising quartz-laden vein. The spot became known as Pony Canyon, and within a few months, the word was out: “Ho! For the Reese River!”
Within a year of the first discovery, Pony Canyon became a silver mecca, with freight teams, stages, and stragglers heading east from Virginia City. At the base of Pony Canyon grew the camp of Clifton, while in the canyon itself was the fledgling camp of Austin, reportedly named for Austin, Texas. Originally, Clifton was the location of choice because it was on flat ground. But the silver mines were in the canyon, and when better roads were constructed up to an area widened to allow for more buildings, Clifton became merely a staging area for shipment to Austin, which was a burgeoning city of about seven thousand people and, in the summer of 1863, the newly crowned seat of Lander County.
Austin is located on the western edge of the Toiyabe Range, and as prospectors fanned out all through the mountains, the town became the supply center for the entire area. Incorporated in 1864, Austin eventually featured banks, hotels, gaslights along the city streets, lovely churches, and a daily newspaper: the Reese River Reveille. The Manhattan Silver Company brought a steadying element to the town in 1865 when it consolidated mining properties and erected a mill. Solid production of silver ore fueled a prosperity that lasted throughout the 1870s.
St. George’s Episcopal Church in Austin is the only historic church in town that still has regular Sunday services.
At the first service at Austin’s St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, erected in 1866, tickets were sold to the mass to help pay for the church’s new roof.
Traveling journalist J. Ross Browne complimented Austinites by saying, “The population is one of the best I have seen in a mining town—active, industrious, hospitable, and orderly.” Of Austin’s location, however, he added, “ I know of no reason at all why any human being should live in such a country; and yet some people do, and they seem to like it.”
In 1880, the Nevada Central Railroad connected Austin to the Transcontinental Railroad at Battle Mountain, giving rise to even more optimism about Austin, because it meant shipping costs would markedly decrease. The line ended below Pony Canyon at what used to be Clifton, and a spur line, the Austin City Railway, took goods from the Nevada Central up to Austin. It was known as the Mule’s Relief because goods could be sent uphill by rail rather than by pack animals.
By the time the Nevada Central arrived, however, the peak years for the Reese River District were already over. Mining gradually slowed until 1887, when operations ceased altogether, after producing more than nineteen million dollars in silver. They were revived by Anson Phelps Stokes for a decade commencing in 1894. (On your driving tour of town, you will see Stokes’ primary legacy in Austin.) Modest mining efforts in the twentieth century brought continued hopes, all of which eventually faded.
WALKING AND DRIVING AROUND AUSTIN
Austin features eleven buildings or sites on the National Register of Historic Places. You will see the first as you enter Austin from the east—a small, one-story, granite building on the north side of the highway. This is the 1863 Gridley Store, owned by grocer Ruel C. Gridley. As a consequence of losing an election bet in April 1864, Gridley had to carry a fifty-pound sack of flour through town while jovially heckled by townspeople. In a subsequent celebration for the completion of his “penance,” Gridley offered to auction off his flour sack to the highest bidder, with the proceeds donated to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a charity aiding ill or wounded Union soldiers. The public-spirited citizens then proceeded to buy, re-auction, and re-buy the sack repeatedly until the total raised for the charity, in that day alone, was about $6,000. Furthermore, Gridley still had the sack.
Leland House, now a private residence, served as a boardinghouse and restaurant in the 1880s.
Gridley’s flour sack became a symbol of patriotic generosity, both in Nevada and all across the nation, and when Gridley sold his then-famous sack for the final time in 1865 at the Sanitary Fair in St. Louis, one estimate says he had raised an astonishing $275,000 for the charity, which was the forerunner of the Red Cross.
Main Street has a downhill run from the Gridley Store all the way through town. Fermin Bruner, who spent his childhood years in Berlin (see pages 290–291) and then Austin after the turn of the twentieth century, remembered riding a large bobsled packed with children, with a coal oil lamp on the front, down a snow-packed Main Street. By that time, Austin’s heyday was over, and he reported that there was little horse and buggy traffic to worry about.
The Austin Museum, on your left at 180 Main Street as you head into town, is a good place to start your exploration. It features five rooms of displays and many historic photographs.
West of the museum is the Toiyabe Cafe, which, in addition to good food when I ate there, has an invaluable brochure featuring a walking or driving tour. The tour even suggests a route to follow, beginning back at Gridley’s Store.
Since you should have that brochure, I won’t detail it here but rather point out some of my favorite Austin buildings.
Down Main Street from the café is St. George’s Episcopal Church, also on the National Register of Historic Places. Built of locally fired brick, the church has a lovely, original interior featuring a handsome Mills organ, which was brought around Cape Horn for installation in the then-new church in 1878. The church is still in active use, and, on Sundays, Austinites expect to hear the tolling of the church’s bell.
Two other attractive brick churches, also on the historic register, are on Court Street, one block north of Main. The more dramatic is St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, built in 1866 and the oldest Catholic church still standing in Nevada. Nearby is the more austere Methodist church, constructed in the same year.
Down Main Street west of the Episcopal church stands the 1871 former Lander County Courthouse. If it’s open, go up to the second floor to see the original courtroom. A judge told me that the jurors’ swivel chairs have surprised many occupants because of how far back they sway. The county seat was moved to Battle Mountain in 1979, but the building still serves county purposes.
Although the tour brochure does not feature any residences, there are several to view on your tour of Austin. Across the street from the courthouse is my favorite, a wonderfully restored private residence called Leland House, which was built of adobe in the 1860s, with later brick additions in the rear. The original roof consisted of more than two thousand flattened tin cans, their ends carefully crimped together. It was a boardinghouse, but it also offered meals to the public, under both Maggie Eames, who purchased the building in the 1860s, and Cynthia Leland, who bought it in 1884. The latter placed a large sign on the roof proclaiming it “Leland House.” An advertisement that year in the Reveille boasted, “The table is supplied at all times with the best the market affords. Delicacies in season. Board . . . $1.00 Single Meals . . . 50¢.”
Some of the historic buildings in the main business district have been so altered that they have lost their historic appearance. A notable exception is the International Hotel, originally constructed in 1859 in Virginia City. When it was taken down in 1863, to be replaced by a larger, more elaborate hotel in that location, portions of the original were packed onto freight wagons and shipped to Austin. Now a café and saloon, it features a marvelous bar with an elaborate, mirrored back, which, like the Episcopal church’s organ, was also brought around Cape Horn.
Stokes Castle is Austin’s most famous landmark, and that is truly unfortunate, because many structures are far more attractive and have more history—but Stokes Castle remains Austin’s oddity. It was apparently fashioned, according to a Nevada historical sign at the site, after a tower near Rome. Begun in 1896 and completed a year later, what is now called Stokes Castle—but was always called The Tower by its creator—is a three-story monstrosity made of local granite. The tower was the inspiration, if that’s the right word, of Anson Phelps Stokes, a railroad and mining tycoon with prominent blueblood Eastern roots. If I sound a bit harsh about this building, I must add that I have seen photos of it in its heyday, and it is hard to imagine that the monolith was ever, in anybody’s eyes, even remotely attractive. But famous it remains. It was momentarily occupied by Stokes’ family in 1897. Despite its sumptuous furnishings at the time, one can almost hear a collective “Oh, dear!” from the visiting family when they first saw it. Despite that, it is on the National Register of Historic Places. To see Stokes’ abomination, take Castle Road, on the west end of Austin, southwest for .6 of a mile.
West of Castle Road and down the hill on U.S. 50 is the beautiful Austin Cemetery, one of the more interesting graveyards in this book. With sections for Catholics, Masons, Odd Fellows, and ordinary citizens, it contains a generous collection of markers of varied materials and several ornate fences. One elaborate headstone is of an angel, reading from a book, for Mrs. L. W. Compton, a native of County Limerick, Ireland, who died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six. What seems a bit arrogant to me is that Mr. L. W. Compton did not see fit to have his wife’s first name on the stone.
Austin seems like a rather small town now, but the size of its cemetery attests to the large population that once lived there. The graveyard is divided into four sections.
The road on the east end of the cemetery heads down a hill and into the rodeo grounds. This was the site of Clifton, the rival to Austin that disappeared. It was here that the Nevada Central Railroad had its terminus, and a plaque marks the location of the railroad’s roundhouse and turntable. Fermin Bruner, the same little boy who bobsledded through town, said that the highlight of his day was when the train crew would allow him and the other boys to help push the manual turntable, with a locomotive aboard, in order to back the engine into its shed for the night. (The railroad was abandoned in 1938.)
WHEN YOU GO
Austin is 143 miles west of Ely and 168 miles east of Reno on U.S. Highway 50.