We’ve spent the last few weeks looking at Empire City from the ground, so I thought we’d try something different this week. Empire City is a former town east of Carson City, located along a bend in the river. The city was popular as a location for gold and silver milling during the heyday of the Comstock Lode, but after the mines dried up so did the town.

I recently found some maps of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, and along with them was this detailed drawing of the street layout of Empire City. The railroad is the curving group of three lines traveling left to right across the map, and the Carson River is on the lower right. Using the river and the railroad’s path, we can line up this map with a satellite photo of what the Empire Ranch area looks like today.

I doubt Empire City was ever actually this big. The railroad plows through quite a few of these city blocks, so they probably only ever existed on paper. But it does show the extent of the town, and where the main downtown streets would have been located. Modern-day Morgan Mill Road actually doesn’t really line up with any of the old roads. Front Street was angled more to the southwest, and went onto what is the golf course today. Front and Second Streets dead end into a large rectangular plot of land that I think was the grounds of the Mexican Mill, one of the two big mills in this area. The superintendent’s house still stands at the corner of Morgan Mill Rd and Empire Ranch Rd, which is right inside that rectangle. The town’s limits even extended west past Empire Ranch Rd, where the houses are more dense today.

Overall it’s interesting to see an old part of town that has been completely erased.

This aerial photo below is from 1967, and even though there was very little of the modern developments that are on the site now, like the golf course and the industrial buildings, you can see that even by the 1960s there was hardly any trace of Empire City left. You can still barely make out the scar of the railroad line across the land, though. At this point it had been about 30 years since the tracks were removed along here. It’s also interesting to see that the river had two channels back then, one of which has completely dried up now.