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    Dayton
    Dayton
    Dayton
    Ebook207 pages1 hour

    Dayton

    By Laura Tennant and Jack Folmar

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Dayton's history begins with Nevada's first gold discovery in July 1849. It started with a California-bound pack train, led by trail guide Abner Blackburn, setting up camp at the mouth of a canyon that drained into the Carson River. While waiting for the snow to melt in the Sierra, Blackburn went prospecting and dug gold from the creek bed. The news of his discovery spread, and prospectors rushed to the site they called Gold Cañon--today's Dayton. In May 1851, diarist Lucena Pfuffer Parsons, traveling with a wagon train, camped at the site and reported about 200 miners living in the canyon. She noted that they were finding enough gold to trade for supplies. In 1859, after working their way up the canyon, miners discovered a large silver and gold deposit known as the Comstock Lode. This discovery led Nevada to statehood in 1864.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateJul 13, 2015
    ISBN9781439652213
    Dayton
    Author

    Laura Tennant

    Dayton historian Laura Tennant is a Silver City, Nevada, native; graduate of Old Dayton High School; a journalist; and former editor of the Dayton Courier. Laura is one of the founders of the Dayton Museum as well as the Historical Society of Dayton Valley (HSDV). Photographer Jack Folmar manages the digital and print photography for HSDV and serves as a docent for the museum. They have compiled stories and photographs from museum archives, historical societies, and personal collections, capturing Dayton's place in Nevada's history.

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      Book preview

      Dayton - Laura Tennant

      published.

      INTRODUCTION

      Dayton’s 162-year-old story holds more significance in Nevada history than most people realize. Some 93 years have passed since the Nevada Historical Society published Fanny Hazlett’s Historical Sketch and Reminiscences of Dayton, Nevada in its book Historical Society Papers, 1921–1922, and Dayton’s contribution to the state’s earliest development has nearly been forgotten. The town’s name and history have even been omitted from some textbooks on Nevada history. If it were not for the immigrants who saw this area in the 1850s and 1860s and kept diaries, as well as the early Dayton families whose descendants have maintained archives of photographs and historical stories, the town’s rightful place in American history would have been lost.

      Dayton lies in a fertile valley along the Carson River, 12 miles east of Carson City, the state capital. Around 10,000 years ago, the waters of the prehistoric Lahonian Lake lapped at the shores of Dayton Valley. Artifacts left in the lowlands and surrounding mountains indicate Native Americans inhabited this area thousands of years before Euro-Americans settled here in the 1850s.

      Early white settlers who traveled in pack trains from California to Salt Lake City followed established Indian trails through what is now Dayton. After trail guide Abner Blackburn first found gold in Nevada, at the mouth of Gold Canyon in 1849, the word spread and miners began settling here.

      In 1850, Congress created Utah Territory, which included the area called the Carson Valley. The valley ranged from the Sierra Nevada at Genoa to east of Dayton. When the Gold Rush began in California in 1848, Dayton’s Indian trails quickly became roadways for pedestrians, wagons, horses, cattle, and sheep. Dayton’s history had become exciting.

      In 1851, Washington Loomis and Nathaniel Haskill opened a tent trading post near the mouth of Gold Canyon. For some reason, they challenged territorial sheriff William Byrnes to a shooting contest and then, at the meeting site, one of them tried to shoot him. Angered by these actions, prospectors formed the first miners court in Nevada. Afraid of being lynched, Loomis and Haskill fled to California.

      By 1852, Andrew Spoffard Hall of Fort Wayne, Indiana, owned the trading post and Hall’s Station became the only stop on the trail west for 40 miles. Thousands of immigrants passed through this valley. A few ladies are memorable because they kept diaries about life on the trail.

      Lucena Puffer Parsons, 26, on her honeymoon, kept a daily diary when she and her husband, George, left Missouri bound for California in 1850. The Parsons’ wagon company reached Gold Canyon on May 25, 1851. The travelers spent 13 days camping with the 200 placer miners at work in the canyon, and Lucena wrote in her diary every day. She even notes that John Reed and his party stopped there to prospect on their way to build Mormon Station. Lucena did not know that she had recorded Dayton’s earliest written history.

      Immigrants Lucy and William Cooke and their baby, Sissy, arrived at Hall’s Station in May 1853 after months on the trail. In a letter to her sister, written from the area of today’s Dayton, Lucy says her husband hired on as a miner for $50 a month with room and board at Hall’s trading post and tavern. Everyone stops here and pack trains from Sacramento arrive frequently, Lucy writes, adding that this is a great rendezvous for gamblers, and the miners gamble with playing cards all night.

      Also in 1853, Laura Ellis Dettenrider and her husband, George, arrived in Dayton via wagon. Laura kept a journal and recorded a treasure trove of early Nevada history happening around Dayton, including the first marriage and first divorce. One of Laura’s tidbits of news is that 213 wagons, 360 horses and mules, and 7,150 sheep passed across this settlement’s immigrant trails in July 1854. The Parsons had built a log cabin on the river and developed a farm, and Laura documented details of the unprecedented migration west as it happened here.

      Meanwhile, Gold Canyon placer miners continued working the bed of Gold Canyon Creek in the winter, when there was water in the creek. They needed a water source for summer gold mining. So, in 1857, Edward Rose and his associates hired 50 or more Chinese men in San Francisco and brought them to Dayton to dig a four-mile-long water ditch from the Carson River west of town to the placer miners in the canyon. When the ditch was finished in 1858, some of the Chinese workers prospected for gold and built shelters along the Carson River in what is today Dayton; this became Nevada’s first Chinatown.

      In 1859, times were destined to change in this end of Utah Territory. Working their way up Gold Canyon, the prospectors hit pay dirt above the modern site of Virginia City and found the world’s richest vein of silver, still referred to as the Big Bonanza and Comstock Lode. Thousands of miners swarmed to Utah Territory. Nearly every able-bodied man in the lower canyon at Dayton—except the Chinese and a few hardcore placer miners—rushed to Sun Mountain to strike it rich. However, the miners at the head of Gold Canyon in Virginia City quickly learned that there was not enough water on the mountain to process the ore. By the fall of 1859, teamsters began hauling tons of ore to mills that were hastily constructed on the Carson River at the north and west end of the Dayton Valley.

      By 1863, there were 18 hotels and restaurants in Dayton and the town was the commercial center and business hub of the Comstock. Like in most Nevada mining towns, however, life for Dayton’s residents was based on a bust or boom economy. When the Comstock Lode ore’s values diminished during the 1870s, only a few Dayton mills remained in business.

      The construction of the Carson and Colorado Railroad and its depot in Dayton in 1881 spurred the economy, and political doings at the Lyon County Courthouse kept businesses going. Nonetheless, when the Dayton courthouse burned in 1909 and Nevada legislators voted to move the county seat to Yerington in 1911, a death blow was delivered to the town. While some mills created prosperity here in the early 1900s and later in the 1930s, Dayton’s golden days had lost their luster.

      Luckily, though, Italian immigrants had begun settling here in the late 1880s. They bought bottomland property and developed productive farms and ranches up and down the Carson River. This quieter lifestyle held the community together for 60 years.

      Then, out of the blue, in the late 1980s and the 1990s, the valley began to change when an Arnold Palmer golf course and an urban-style subdivision were constructed in the southeast end of the valley. More and more people wanted to live in this pretty valley and the growth rate spiraled upward.

      Now,

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