Tag: washoevalley

Rick Cooper, of washoevalley.org, has put up on Flickr one of the Then and Now photos that I've wanted to do for a while.

Photo by RickC

On the left is the V&T Railroad steaming through Washoe Canyon, at the north end of Washoe Valley. Locomotive #11, the Reno, is at the head of the train. On the right is the same scene as it appears today. The wooden bridges that crossed the creek are still standing, but have rotted away after 58 years of disuse. They're one of the last tangible remnants of the old V&T, besides the equipment itself. #11, the Reno, is on display in Arizona at the Old Tucson theme park, but it's in bad shape and been left to bake under the hot desert sun.

WashoeValley.org has a story on the "town" of Sundown Town. Sundown was an Old West amusement park that was built in the hills above Old Washoe City in 1960. It was built on the shores of Joy Lake and included a saloon, a jail, a blacksmith shop, and a livery stable. They had stagecoach rides, gunfights, and a trained bull. It was all the brainchild of Buster Keaton, Jr., son of the silent film star. He and a couple of partners envisioned Sundown Town as an Old West getaway for visitors to Reno, and they saw it becoming very popular and growing over the decades, kind of like Disneyland. It was kind of unfortunately-named, though, since a "sundown town" is more commonly used to describe a place where Blacks or Indians had to leave town after the sun set. Minden, reportedly, was a sundown town, and that's where the tradition of blowing the town whistle at 6pm started.

I doubt that the name contributed to Sundown Town's downfall, though. By 1963 the park was closed and sold, probably just because they weren't able to attract the crowds they needed to keep such a place open. A few years later the Ponderosa Ranch took the same concept and made it fly at Lake Tahoe, but even that park ended up closing recently.

Sundown Town went through several owners after closing, each of which promised to reopen the park bigger and better, but nothing ever came of it. Many of the buildings burned in 1966, and today the site is in private hands and closed to the public. Joy Lake is located to the northwest of Old Washoe City. To get there you take the road by the Chocolate Nugget that goes under the new freeway underpass. But I think the whole lake is privately owned, and trespassing is not allowed.

Satellite view of the site of Sundown Town. Joy Lake is to the south (left).

WashoeValley.org also links to an in-depth site about Sundown Town, written by someone whose mother was a co-owner of the park. If you're interested, you need to go read the whole thing.

Every time I drive by, I wonder how much time this old sign has left.

There's an article up at washoevalley.org about the early history of Washoe Valley. But it's not just a regular article, it's actually a reprint of an article that was written back in 1952. And the 1952 article quotes heavily from the Nevada State Journal from 1878. And it's all looking back at the way the Valley was in the 1860s, before the V&T Railroad was built, when the Jumbo Grade was the best way to get ore down from Virginia City to be processed at the mills. Back then the Washoe Valley was one of the busiest places in the state of Nevada.

From the toll station, the Valley in the 1860's appeared to be one long strip of industry. The great white-stone Ophir dominated the end of the causeway, and Dall's Mill at Franktown sent forth columns of smoke from its "Barrel process" roasters. In and around Washoe City were eight more big quartz mills; the Atchison, the Manhattan, the New York, the North, the Buckeye, the Tomolee, the Napa and the Alfred. Still another, at the south end of the Valley, gave Mill City its name. The sawmills dotted the slopes on the west side of the Valley. The town swarmed over the flat, each one trying to out-do its neighbors in outward signs of prosperity, population and noise.

By the 1870s the mills had moved to the Carson River near Mound House, since the railroad could bring the ore there faster than a wagon could bring it to Washoe Valley. So the Valley settled into what it is today, a quiet place to settle down and relax for some, a speed bump on the way to somewhere else for others.

Read the whole article.

I've been following over the last few weeks the developing story at washoevalley.org of the South Valleys Area Plan, or SVAP. It seems that a large developer is trying to push for high-density development in the Washoe Valley, since the Truckee Meadows where Reno is located is nearly full. So their thinking, I guess, is that it's time to move on to the next, big, open valley and start filling that in too. And the Washoe County Commissioners, it seems, have no problem just rubber stamping anything the developers come up with

So the residents of Washoe Valley are starting to fight back, and starting to get pretty vocal in their opposition to the plan. The developer is responding with insults, calling them Chicken Littles. "They are going to get municipal water and sewer whether they like it or not," said their lawyer. "They can have their rural lifestyles. But the only ones who are going to be able to live there are cows." That's nice and mature.

There was a county commissioner meeting last night on the subject, and Washoe Valley residents flooded the meeting. Over 300 of them showed up to speak the voice of the opposition, and it sounds like the county might be starting to listen and back down a little. I wish them luck, and I'll be following the progress at washoevalley.org.

Rich Moreno published a piece a couple of weeks ago on the Jumbo Grade. The Jumbo Grade was the wagon road that ran between Virginia City and the Washoe Valley, and it was one of the routes used to get ore down off the mountain and down near water where it could be milled and the gold and silver extracted. There was also a little mining town on the grade itself, but it's all gone now. The V&T Railroad pretty much put the wagon roads out of business when it opened in 1869, and now the Jumbo Grade is just a small dirt road that you either have to hike or bike if you want to take a shortcut across the mountains.

Hat Tip to www.washoevalley.org, and to Rick, who gives this Then and Now picture of the town of Jumbo.