| Two miners named Pat
McLaughlin and Peter O'Reilly discovered gold at the head
of Six-Mile Canyon in 1859. A fellow miner, Henry Comstock,
stumbled upon their find and claimed it was on his property.
The gullible McLaughlin and O'Reilly believed him and assured
Comstock a place in history when the giant lode was named.
Another
miner, James Finney is reported to have named the town during
a drunken celebration. He dropped a bottle of whiskey on
the ground and christened the newly-found tent-and-dugout
town on the slopes of Mt. Davidson "Old Virginny Town,"
in honor of himself and his birthplace.
At the peak of its glory, Virginia City
was a boisterous town with something going on 24 hours a
day both above and below ground for its nearly 30,000 residents.
There were visiting celebrities, Shakespeare plays, opium
dens, newspapers, competing fire companies, fraternal organizations,
at least five police precincts, a thriving redlight district,
and the first Miner's Union in the U.S. The International
Hotel was six stories high and boasted the West's first
elevator, called "rising room."
A devastating fire nearly wiped out the
town in 1875 destroying over 2,000 structures, but the town
rebuilt itself in just a year. Many of the buildings standing
today date back from that time. |
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The biggest problem
in this grubstake paradise was the sticky blue-gray mud that
clung to picks and shovels. When the mud was assayed, it proved
to be silver ore worth over $2,000 a ton - in 1859 dollars!
The resulting boom turned Virginny Town to Virginia City,
the most important settlement between Denver and San Francisco;
and the grubby prospectors into instant millionaires who built
mansions, imported furniture and fashions from Europe and
the Orient, and financed the Civil War. |
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| The
resulting boom turned Virginny Town to Virginia City, the
most important settlement between Denver and San Francisco;
and the grubby prospectors into instant millionaires who
built mansions, imported furniture and fashions from Europe
and the Orient, and financed the Civil War.
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