Glad you asked! (And yes, we were hoping someone would bite on that one.)
In 1858, Abraham V. Curry was a 43-year-old businessman who, born near Ithaca, N.Y., had worked on the docks in Cleveland, the hills of San Francisco, and the mining boomtowns of the California gold rush. He then saw potential in the prime real estate at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, through which emigrants had to travel to get to California.
Curry traveled to Genoa, one of the two earliest settlements in what, in just a few years, would come to be called Nevada. He found that the price of land in Genoa (pronounced juh-NO-a) was already both outrageous and non-negotiable. So he continued north to Eagle Valley and bought 885-acre Eagle Ranch for $1,000. Though the discovery of the Comstock Lode in the Virginia Range, which hemmed in Eagle Valley on the east, was still more than a year in the future and the "ranch" was little more than sand and sage, Curry had found the spot where he’d live out his destiny. Or maybe the spot found him.
The ambitious New Yorker knew he’d never be content with a mere ranch and he immediately began promoting the desolate (though watered and scenic) valley as the eventual site of the state capital, which he named Carson City after famed western explorer Kit Carson. Curry’s dream required an amount of foresight usually relegated to people labeled prophets (if successful) or lunatics (if not): Nevada wasn’t yet a territory, let alone a state (it occupied the western half of Utah Territory at the time); and Eagle Valley could boast no more than a handful of residents and even fewer buildings, so the "city" appellation was just as far-seeing (or far-fetched).
Even the local surveyor refused to lay out a town site in exchange for ownership of a "full city block" of what was then nothing but desert scrub. The surveyor worked instead for an IOU (but soon became the first postmaster of Carson City).
Curry had him lay out wide city streets and a four-square-block area known to settlers as the Plaza, though Curry called it Capitol Square. Lots were sold dirt cheap to anyone who wanted them. Curry used clay from his ranch to fabricate adobe bricks and constructed a few buildings in "town." He also discovered a large limestone outcrop near a warm springs on the property, which he used as a quarry; he dammed the springs and built a bathhouse, which attracted prospectors and travelers.
The winter of 1859-60 was especially severe and conditions in Carson City were still primitive at best, but Abe Curry possessed the faith of Job and he persevered. Spring arrived warm and fresh. That summer the Comstock was discovered mere miles east, and the rush was on. Thousands of frenzied miners and freighters and merchants and lawyers and outfitters and scammers rumbled through Carson City’s dusty (though wide) streets.
Curry himself quickly located a claim high up on the Comstock, consolidated it with a Carson City butcher named Alva Gould, and sold his share to Californians for $2,000 (with which he traveled back to Cleveland to collect his wife and six daughters; his one son was already with him in Carson). The Californians immediately became millionaires from the mine that forever carried his name, the Gould and Curry, and proved to be the richest ore body in the early days of the Comstock.
By 1860, the town’s population had mushroomed to more than 500. By the time Congress created the Territory of Nevada in 1861, burgeoning Carson City beat out both Genoa and Virginia City to become the territorial capital. Curry then befriended fellow New Yorker James Nye, first territorial governor, and helped induce him to convene both the territorial and county governments at Carson.
By then, Uncle Abe, as he was henceforth universally known and revered for his civic spirit and generous soul, was Carson City’s major landowner, contractor, hotelier, saloonkeeper, and road builder. He couldn’t be content, of course, with mere prophethood and property, so he quickly made another transition to politician. He acted frequently as sheriff, was a delegate to an early constitutional convention, and became an aide to James Nye.
He also saw the fulfillment of what one imagines to be his grandest ambition: philanthropy. He donated his hastily constructed Warm Springs Hotel for the first territorial legislature; as the hotel was two miles from town, he transported the legislators in his horse-drawn streetcar, Nevada’s first.
Next, Curry sold his second hotel, the Great Basin, to the government to serve as a courthouse and legislature; the Warm Springs building later became the state prison, with Curry as its first warden. Prison labor quarried the limestone for many of Carson City’s distinctive buildings, some of which stand to this day.
Finally, on Halloween Day 1864, Nevada became a state with Carson City its capital. Abe Curry’s rise from lunatic to prophet had been completed -- in a mere six years.
A year later, Carson City received federal approval to build a branch of the U.S. Mint and Curry not only oversaw construction of the building, he was also appointed its first superintendent when it opened in 1870. (Today, the building houses the Nevada State Museum.)
Uncle Abe resigned his commission at the mint in 1870 to run on the Republican ticket for lieutenant governor, a race he lost. He then turned his attention to building a mammoth stone roundhouse and machine shops for the new Virginia & Truckee Railroad, which connected the mines at Virginia City with the mills in Carson City, and later with the transcontinental railroad, which had arrived in Reno in 1868.
The Grand Ball held to celebrate the opening of the roundhouse and shops on July 4, 1873, proved to be Curry’s swan song. He was compelled to surrender to Nature’s final summons in October 1873 from a stroke at the age of 58.
All in all, Uncle Abe Curry had lived one of the richest lives of any early Nevadan and had earned and maintained a reputation for being one of the most warm-hearted, civic-spirited, generous, and honest men during those turbulent times.
(A minor though interesting side note: The secretary to Territorial Governor James Nye was a Missourian named Orion Clemens. He convinced his younger brother Sam to join him in Nevada. Sam, only 21 at the time, arrived in Carson City in July 1861, eager to assume his duties as secretary to his brother, who was secretary to the governor. He soon found that he had "nothing to do and no salary," and was thus free to create his own diversions.
Sam traveled around Nevada for a couple of years, visiting Lake Tahoe, following the mining rushes to the Humboldt and Aurora districts, and finally settling in Virginia City, where he went to work as a writer for the large daily newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. It was then and there that he assumed the pseudonym by which he was known, for the rest of his life, as one of the most famous essayists, novelists, and storytellers of his time: Mark Twain. He wrote about his adventures in Nevada, which he dubbed "variegated vagabondizing," in his second major work, Roughing It, published in 1872.)
