From Stagecoach Stop to Railroad Station: The Story of Currie, Nevada

 

Goshute Merchantile in Currie

While there’s not much to see in the tiny enclave of Currie, located about an hour south of Wells via U.S. 93, the community has a rich history that dates back to the 1870s, when a freight and stage stop, called Bellinger’s Spring, was established there because of the presence of water.

  In the 1880s, Joseph H. Currie started a ranch at nearby Nelson Creek. In 1906, when the Northern Nevada Railway started building its connecting line between the rich copper mines near Ely and the Southern Pacific Railroad near Cobre, the railroad located a depot at the halfway point, which became the start of a small community named Currie after the largest local rancher.

  The first significant business to open in Currie was the two-story Currie Hotel, which was owned by Currie. Within a few months, a post office opened inside of the hotel (Currie was postmaster) and a second hotel, the Steptoe, was constructed.

  The new settlement soon became an important transportation and livestock hub for the region. In 1908, a telegraph office opened in Currie, followed by a general store and a one-room schoolhouse, which was expanded two years later.

  Currie peaked in about 1910 when the town saw the opening of another store, a saloon, and a railway section house and turntable. When the road from Wells to Ely was paved in the 1920s, Currie gained a gas station and store.

  But Currie began a slow decline after 1941, when the railroad discontinued passenger and mail service at Currie due to a lack of business. During the period between 1906 and 1941, about 4.6 million passengers passed through Currie on the Nevada Northern Railway.

  Nevada Northern Railway freight trains continued running through Currie until Ely’s copper smelters closed on June 20, 1983 and the railroad was shut down a day later. The post office, which had relocated to the general store in the late teens, closed in 1971.

  Today, the original Currie depot remains standing as does the Currie Hotel. A handful of other buildings and foundations from the town’s early years, including the old schoolhouse, can still be seen.

  The town still has about 20 residents, most of whom either work at a gas station and store that is still in operation, an RV park, or a highway maintenance station. There is also an old abandoned dirt airfield located about two miles from the town.

  For more information about Currie, check out Shawn Hall’s two Elko County books, “Connecting the West: Historic Railroad Stops and Stage Stations in Elko County, Nevada” and “Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County.” Both are published by the University of Nevada Press and are available via online vendors or from the press.

  For additional information about Currie and some of its past residents, check out the Elko County Rose Garden historical website, http://elkorose.schopine.com/currie.html.

A Place Called Contact

Housing in Contact, Nevada in the 1930s

  One of the more unusual names found on a Nevada map is the tiny community of Contact, located about 15 miles south of the Idaho border on U.S. Highway 93. The name is said to derive from mining jargon.

  While today, not much remains of Contact—a fire destroyed most of the town’s buildings in 1942—once upon a time it was a fairly thriving mining community.

  According to the late (and great) Elko County historian Howard Hickson, gold and silver ore were discovered in the area as early as the 1870s but it wasn’t until the late 1890s that mining began in earnest. By April 1897, nearly 200 miners were working in the area.

  Despite construction of a smelter that year, the mines were not profitable and by 1900 less than 100 miners were still working the ground there. Things began to pick up again in 1905 and by 1915, a settlement had cropped up that had a 35-room hotel, several saloons, a barbershop, a post office, schools, restaurants, a general store and even a newspaper (the Contact Miner).

  Hickson has written that Contact seemed to experience its most flush times when the United States was at war. He pointed to the fact that from 1916 to 1918, production peaked, and then again from 1942 to 1946.

  The value in keeping Contact’s mines operating during wars was that while the local mines produced some 742 ounces of gold and 58,713 ounces of silver, the real money was in the 3.3 million pounds of copper, 324,233 pounds of lead and 18,400 pounds of zinc that were mined between 1916 and 1958 (when the mines were finally shut down for good).

  Additionally, in 1979 the Los Angeles Times noted that during Prohibition, the town was the largest supplier of bootleg whiskey to Idaho. Hickson said that during a town reunion that year, one former resident claimed there were six moonshine operations in Contact in 1917 that operated until the repeal of Prohibition in 1932.

  The fire in 1942 devasted the town, which was already severely depressed. Flames consumed the store, hotel, restaurants and bars, a service station, a church, and many homes.

  Today, only a few residents still live in Contact, most employed by the Nevada Department of Transportation, which has a maintenance station there.

  Wandering through the sagebrush and high grass, you can still find a few old wooden homes and foundations of some of the stores and other businesses destroyed by the fire.

  Records indicate that the Contact area still has several hundred active mining claims, including the Contact Copper Project, a copper-oxide project that has not yet been developed.

  A few miles north of Contact is Jackpot, a thriving hotel-casino resort community with about 1,200 residents. Jackpot traces its beginnings to 1954, when Idaho outlawed gambling and two Idaho slot machine operators, “Cactus Pete” Piersanti and Don French, moved across the state line to establish two gaming businesses called Cactus Pete’s and the Horseshu Club.

  The town was originally named “Horseshu,” after one of the properties, but Cactus Pete’s objected, so the Elko County Commissioners formally named it “Unincorporated Town No.1.” In 1959, both properties agreed on the name, “Jackpot.”

On the Trail of George Wingfield

 

Wingfield's Reno National Bank on the corner of Virginia and Second streets

  In the 1920s and 30s, banker George Wingfield was the richest person in the Silver State, a man who was sometimes called “The King of Nevada.”

  While today it’s largely historians or old-timers who recall his enormous influence on the state’s economy and politics, a handful of places associated with Wingfield remain standing.

  George Wingfield was born on August 16, 1876 near Fort Smith, Arkansas but raised in Lake County, Oregon, near the Oregon-Nevada border. Wingfield’s father operated a cattle ranch and, after completing the eighth grade in Lakeview, the younger Wingfield began working as a cowhand, a sometime gambler, and occasional horse jockey.

  In 1896, Wingfield moved to Nevada, first to Winnemucca, where he apparently befriended banker George S. Nixon. Two years later, he moved to Golconda, where he operated a saloon, races horses, gambled, and prospected.

  In 1901, Wingfield relocated to the mining boomtown of Tonopah, where he, again, made his living as a gambler and, with his winnings, invested in real estate. A year later, he began to act as a representative for Nixon, who was looking for investment opportunities, particularly in mining claims.

  The Wingfield-Nixon partnership really took root after 1904, when Wingfield headed to the new mining boomtown of Goldfield. There, the two successfully invested in mining claims, businesses, banking and real estate opportunities.

  Within a few years, both were multi-millionaires, who controlled nearly all of the mining operations in Goldfield. It’s been estimated that Wingfield was worth between $20 million and $30 million by the time he was 30 years old.

  In 1909, Wingfield, sensing that Reno was soon to become the largest and most important city in the state, relocated to the Biggest Little City. He would remain living in Reno until his death in 1959.

  At that time, he and Nixon, who became a U.S. Senator from Nevada, ended their partnership, with Nixon taking control of the banks and Wingfield assuming sole control of their mining, real estate and other investments.

  With Nixon’s death in 1912, Wingfield purchased Nixon’s banking interests and began buying up many of the other banks in the state. By 1932, he owned 12 banks and controlled more than half of all the deposits in the state. He also owned two hotels in Reno (the Golden, purchased in 1915, and the Riverside, which he built in 1927), ranching operations throughout the state, a thoroughbred horse farm, and the state’s only bonding company.

  In the early 1930s, the start of the Great Depression, Wingfield’s banks began to suffer massive losses. By 1935, he had lost a substantial part of his holdings and filed for bankruptcy protection.

  But later that year, a good friend, Noble Getchell, a mine owner and state senator from Lander County, invited Wingfield to partner with him in developing a new mine near Golconda. The mine proved to be everything that Getchell and Wingfield hoped and by 1941 it was the largest gold producing mine in the state and within a few years (after World War II) Wingfield was again a wealthy man.

  Retracing Wingfield’s steps across Nevada, one can still find places closely associated with him. One of the most impressive is the still-standing four-story Goldfield Hotel, which he constructed in 1908.

  The hotel, in the center of the former mining town, has been closed since the end of World War II, although several more recent owners have unsuccessfully attempted to restore and reopen it.

  Another Wingfield touch-point is the former Reno National Bank building at 206 North Virginia Street in Reno. Built in 1915 by Wingfield and designed by famed Reno architect Frederic DeLongchamps, the building became part of the Harrah’s resort property in the 1980s.

  More recently, it has been vacant with new owners still determining what to do with the distinctive Classical Revival structure.

  The Riverside Hotel at 17 South Virginia Street in Reno, built by Wingfield in 1927, also remains intact. No longer a hotel, it was renovated and converted to artist lofts in 2000. The Golden Hotel, however, was destroyed in a fire in 1962.

  Wingfield Park, which sits in the middle of the Truckee River in downtown Reno, was built on land donated to the city by Wingfield. Another of his longtime properties, Spanish Springs Ranch, is gone, having been replaced after 1995 by a 400-home subdivision (Redhawk at Wingfield Springs).

  The site of Wingfield longtime home at 219 Court Street in Reno is, sadly, a vacant lot. The home, once listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1912. Unfortunately, it burned down in 2001.