In the days before cars, the care and feeding of horses was big business. Almost everything was transported by horse-drawn wagons and carriages. And those horses needed a place to sleep and rest, and the wagons a place to be stored and repaired. Carson City had several of these, but one large one in downtown was Elrod & Keyser’s Team and Stable Yard.

This yard was at the corner of Telegraph and Plaza Streets, just one block off Carson Street and 2 blocks from the Capitol. It was owned and operated by E.R. Elrod and D. Keyser. This photo is reportedly from 1891, and the snowy scene looks welcoming during this heat wave we’re having. There was a yard on this site as far back as 1875, as seen in Koch’s Bird’s Eye View of town, and the Sanborn maps show it staying here at least until 1907, when it had been renamed Kattelman’s Hay Yard. But by 1941, the yard was gone and there were houses on this block.

The house on the northwest corner (with the pink outline) was actually the subject of a previous Then and Now, back in 2018.

That photo was taken during that house’s demolition in the 1970s. And that was the fate of this whole block, and the blocks surrounding it. All of these blocks have been cleared off and have become parking for the Nugget and the Capitol complex, with cars replacing the horses.

There may be changes coming to this block, though. The Hop and Mae Adams Foundation, a non-profit founded by the owners of the Nugget, owns all these parking lots, and has been looking for years now to develop them into some kind of civic center. 19 years ago plans came out for hotel, conference, and retail space to be built on this land, along with a new city library. That plan never came to be. But now the plan is back, though instead of the library the civic center would be anchored by a new City Hall. Whatever does eventually get built as part of this plan, whether next year or another 20 years in the future, the site of Elrod & Keyser’s Team and Stable Yard is going to be right in the middle of it.