Greater Vegas — the Soul of Carson City

What is it about godforsaken patches of the Nevada desert that give men visions of booming metropolises? It’s hard to say.

Myron Lake bought a collapsed bridge and proceeded to found the world’s biggest little city. Don Laughlin bought a bankrupt bait shop and built, in a few short years, one of the largest gambling centers in the country. And Abe Curry bought a tiny trading post and launched the capital city of a state that didn’t yet exist.

Perhaps it’s water; all three pioneers had rivers — the Truckee, Colorado, and Carson — in common.

Maybe it’s heat — the scorching blinding swelter that gives rise to sugar-plum fairies, pink elephants, and mirages of gold mines.

Probably it’s destiny — the Great Basin and Mojave are littered with the ghosts of boomtowns whose founding fathers dreamed of the prosperity and posterity that only a select few ever achieved.

Whatever it was, Abe Curry did a Bugsy: Standing in the middle of an ocean of sagebrush in the shadow of the sheer eastern scarp of the Sierra Nevada, he envisioned a grand seat of government, which he named after Kit Carson.

Carson City statue of Kit Carson

Curry’s dream required an amount of foresight usually relegated to people labeled as prophets (if successful) or lunatics (if not). In 1859, he foresaw a capital where there wasn’t a state yet, not even a territory. There was barely a settlement within 200 miles. Still, he laid out a town site, with wide boulevards, small residential lots, and a four-square-block area known to settlers as the Plaza, though Curry called it Capitol Square.

Abe Curry

Five years later, the silver and gold mines of the Comstock Lode, under the streets of Virginia City, had given rise to the state of Nevada, with “Curry’s Folly” as, yep, the capital.

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 was also a quarryman, mining the local sandstone with which he built the Carson City Mint (now the Nevada State Museum), the Ormsby Hotel, the original Legislature building, and the first Supreme Court (all still standing).

Nevada State Museum, the old Carson City Mint

The geographic center of Nevada is 200 miles away, roughly 30 miles southeast of Austin. Reno and Las Vegas are the financial and entertainment centers, magnets for visitors and transplants. The claim of historic center rightly belongs to Virginia City.

But Carson City is the power center — to which all the state looks for leadership (political though it is), order (bureaucratic though it might be), and vision. And it all started with one man, standing in the sweltering desert, dreaming of a City of Gold.

statue of Uncle Abe Curry in Carson City