Mines, other pits loom large in Lander County

Editor’s Note: Nevada 150 is a yearlong series highlighting the people, places and things that make up the history of the state.

Lander County is home to bustling mines, wide-open spaces, ghost towns and even a castle.

Then there’s that whole “Armpit of America” thing.

That’s the title Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten bestowed on Battle Mountain, Lander County’s largest town, in a 2001 article.

Let’s just say Weingarten didn’t win two Pulitzer Prizes for being wrong about stuff.

Shar Peterson, then the executive director of the Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce, played a prominent role in the armpit story, and she feels the same way about it now that she did then: It wasn’t the ideal sort of marketing for the town, but it was marketing nonetheless.

“The way I saw it, when you’re handed lemons you make lemonade,” said Peterson, now a senior spokeswoman for Newmont Mining Corp. and the chamber president for Battle Mountain, her home of 33 years. “The whole town pretty much embraced it.”

For a few years, Battle Mountain hosted a “Festival in the Pit” — sponsored by Old Spice — that featured car races, hot-air balloon rides and a parade.

The annual event eventually faded away, but the town still trades on its unpolished image. Its current tourism slogan is “Battle Mountain: Are You Tough Enough?”

It could double as a motto for the whole county, where ghost towns and failed mining camps dot the high desert landscape.

Created in 1861, Lander was one of Nevada’s nine original counties, taking the entire northeastern quarter of what was then a territory. Within nine years of statehood in 1864, three new counties — Elko, Eureka and White Pine — would be carved from Lander’s roughly 31,000-square-mile expanse.

The county was named for Frederick William Lander, a transcontinental surveyor, poet and Union general who was wounded in the Civil War and died of pneumonia in 1862.

Lander has had three county seats — first the mining hub and Pony Express stop of Jacobsville; then Austin, from 1863 until 1979; and finally Battle Mountain.

Jacobsville is now a ghost town; Austin nearly so.

With just a few hundred residents remaining, the Nevada version of Texas’ capital city has been described as a “living ghost town,” though it still ranks as Lander’s second-largest community.

Austin is also home to one of Nevada’s most famous abandoned buildings.

In 1896, mining and railroad magnate Anson Phelps Stokes set out to build a three-story tower patterned after one he had admired in Italy. It was meant to be a summer home, but the Stokes family only used it in 1897 and 1898 before selling off their holdings in the area and leaving Austin for good.

Stokes Castle was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

Lander County’s other claim to fame: The geographic center of Nevada is in Monitor Valley, at the southeastern corner of the county.

It would be easy to say Lander’s best days are behind it, but the numbers don’t quite bear that out. The county’s current population of about 6,000 people, roughly two-thirds of them in Battle Mountain, is more than double what it was during the boom in 1880.

Mining has a lot to do with that, Peterson said.

Newmont and Barrick, the world’s two largest gold producers, each operate an open-pit mine in Lander County.

Those operations, fueled by record gold prices, provided a “bubble of protection” for the county as other parts of Nevada suffered through high unemployment and stagnant growth during the Great Recession, she said.

The price of gold has dropped a bit since then, but Newmont’s Phoenix mine, 16 miles south of Battle Mountain, expects to keep operating — and keep providing good jobs and revenue to Lander County — for another 20 years at least.

Noting the recent construction of new “stick-built homes” in Battle Mountain, Peterson said: “I really think we’ve come a long way.”

She thinks the town benefited from its unflattering nickname because it drew some extra visitors off Interstate 80, a few of whom stopped by the Chamber of Commerce to say they didn’t think the armpit label was fair.

Peterson said the Washington Post story also prompted some needed economic development and beautification efforts in Lander County’s largest community, which has always been the sort of place where people take what they have and make it work.

Not long after the article, for example, someone finally fixed the burned-out S on the giant SHELL sign that loomed over the town.

The sign has since been torn down.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.