“Mountain
City is not a town or city or anything else. Mountain City is copper and a
little silver and less gold. Mountain City is a state of flux and
impermanence.”
—Gregory Martin. Mountain City, 2000
It’s
fortunate that writers like Gregory Martin and Helen Oster and Shawn Hall and
Stanley Paher have written portions of the story of Mountain City, located
about 85 miles north of Elko and 16 miles from the Idaho border, because the community
is slowly but surely fading away.
Founded
in 1869, Mountain City was originally known as Cope after gold was discovered
near what became the townsite by a miner named Jesse Cope. A mining district
formed in May of that year and within a month some 300 people had settled in
the area,
In
July—things happened quickly—Cope was renamed Mountain City and by the end of
the summer the settlement boasted more than 700 people. Historical accounts say
that the town had nine stores, two rooming houses, two bakeries, two breweries,
four blacksmith shops, two livery stables, two drugstores, an assay office, a
bank, a post office, one first-class hotel, a brothel and an astounding 20
saloons. A year later, it had grown to encompass more than 200 buildings and
had a population of nearly 1,000. A school opened in July 1871.
But
like so many other mining towns, the ore began to be played out. By early 1872,
the population started to decline as miners moved on to more promising areas.
By 1875, Mountain City had only 77 residents and by 1882 the population was
down to 20.
As
mining declined, ranching became more prominent and several large outfits
started in the area.
The
area continued to experience ebbs and flows over the next decades including
short-lived booms from 1877-1880 and again from 1904 to 1908.
Mountain
City’s fortunes perked up in the early 1930s after the discovery of large
copper deposits in nearby Rio Tinto (about four miles southeast). Many of the
buildings still standing in the town today date from this period, when Mountain
City became the major supply point for those working the Rio Tinto mines.
But
like earlier booms, Rio Tinto began to decline in the late 1940s and Mountain
City did too. The town saw a brief flurry of new mining interest—this time,
uranium—in the mid-1950s but that fizzled within a few years when the ore
deposits proved to be smaller than originally thought.
Since
then, the community has had a permanent of between 75-80, many of whom work on
area ranches, a handful of local businesses and government offices (the US
Forest Service has an office there).
Sadly,
one of the town’s longest lasting businesses, Tremewan’s Store, which was the
subject of Gregory Martin’s book (his family operated it for more than 40
years), closed in 2002. Other businesses, like the Miner’s Club, still stand
but have long been closed and abandoned.
One
place that has survived is the Mountain City Motel, Bar and Steakhouse, a
popular local hangout that offers good food in a friendly atmosphere. It is
located at 525 Davidson Street (Highway 225 is called Davidson Street in
Mountain City limits), 775-763-6622,
A
great source of historical information about Mountain City is Shawn Hall’s
book, “Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County,”
published by the University of Nevada Press and available from Amazon.
