Surviving cycles, straddling eras

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

GOLD HILL

What’s really old has been new, old and new again throughout the life of this town and much of the rest of Storey County.

These days Gold Hill and Virginia City, once Nevada’s population center, are smaller but still busy in their own way. A company started mining the famed Comstock Lode again in 2012, and it’s also pushing for more tourists to stop by and learn about the area’s culture and history.

Booms and busts in these enclaves line right up with a narrative deeply embedded in Nevada lore. In less romantic parlance, we call it economic cycles. But in stark contrast to the Silver State’s more modern boomtown, Las Vegas, these neighbors meld old and new with a decidedly 21st century take on the future and past.

Heading uphill on winding state Route 342 after leaving U.S. Highway 50 outside Carson City, dusty roads lead to mines that have been drawing prospectors off and on for more than 150 years. They come in hopes of getting rich off the Virginia Range’s precious metals, including the one that earned Gold Hill its name, deposited in the area’s ancient rock.

“Danger” signs mark old mine shafts that sometimes brought a harsh wake-up call to that hope. One aging hoist sits above an opening to the Yellow Jacket Mine, site of an 1869 fire that killed 35 and is often called Nevada’s deadliest mining accident.

But that hole in the ground sits behind the Gold Hill Hotel, lately the site of a more pleasant, and recurring, event: a weekly lecture series. Parts of the wood and stone-front buildings went up in either 1859 or 1861 (history buffs can’t agree). Current owner Comstock Mining Inc. says it has also served as a private residence and a brothel. It’s definitely still a watering hole, as evidenced by the half-dozen drinkers patronizing its cavernlike bar set off a dining room on a cool fall night.

About 50 locals and visitors filled the dining room that September evening to learn about brothers Ethan and Hosea Grosh. Former state historic preservation officer Ron James co-authored a book about the pair of fortune-seekers and offered an abbreviated version of their story that night.

The letters the Groshes wrote back to family in Pennsylvania told their own story, James said, but also chronicled mining life in pre-statehood Storey County in the 1850s.

It wasn’t easy.

“They were losing their teeth. They talked all the time about their illnesses,” said James, now executive director of the Comstock Foundation for History and Culture, whose board leadership includes Comstock Mining Inc. executives. “They weren’t doing really very well at all.”

Both brothers died in their early 30s from either work-related injury or the brutal cold. Their family, who had helped finance their mining enterprise, eventually filed a lawsuit claiming they were owed money from Comstock Lode profits. The letters — which told of dabbling in ore mining and finding silver while also placer mining, aka panning or rocking, for gold — were their evidence.

It didn’t work out in the family’s favor, James said, because the brothers were digging near but not into what most people now agree are the reaches of the Comstock.

UPS AND DOWNS

Storey County had some 20,000 residents during its 1870s peak — making it Nevada’s biggest city back then — and it’s been up and down since. Now about 4,000 call it home, about as many as the Census Bureau counted in 1900. The number has dipped as low as 568 in the past 110 years.

Founded in 1861 when Nevada was still a U.S. territory, Storey is the state’s smallest county by area at 264 square miles. (The distinction belonged to Ormsby County before it merged with Carson City in 1969.) By comparison, Nye County is Nevada’s largest at more than 18,000 square miles. That’s bigger than all of Maryland.

David Toll lives in the Gold Hill house where his grandfather lived a century ago. While mining brought his family to town, he and dozens of others don’t want it happening anywhere near their backyards now.

Toll and his wife, Robin Cobbey, helped found the Comstock Residents Association, which has been critical — particularly with environmental concerns — of Comstock Mining’s foray into extracting Storey County’s silver and gold lode. Toll’s group contends open-pit mining sends at least annoying, if not harmful, dust and other substances into the air.

The state in August temporarily shut down the company’s ore-crushing operations and investigated why CMI wasn’t using air pollution detectors. Operations restarted a week later after the devices were installed, and the company contends no pollutants were emitted.

Things were different, Toll said, in his grandfather’s day.

“The obvious difference is what he did built cities,” said Toll, who formerly ran the local newspaper. “What these guys do is tear them apart.”

Comstock Mining President and CEO Corrado De Gasperis agreed things were different back then but countered that his company is misunderstood because of the way others operated years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s pits were left wide open and unrestored, he said.

CMI, De Gasperis said, takes a more comprehensive approach. Besides just taking from the Earth, there will be giving back.

That means investing in history, which De Gasperis views as a boon for the future. The company has committed money equivalent to 1 percent of its Lucerne Mine operation profits to support the Comstock Foundation. Comstock Mining — whose New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol is LODE — supports preservation and restoration in the federally designated Comstock Historic District.

“We think of ourselves as much more than a mining company,” De Gasperis said. “The bottom line is sustainability.”

The publicly traded company’s books closed 2013 with almost $25 million in revenue. Nevada granted it a permit to increase production in late 2013. Early numbers show gains. CMI poured 4,500 ounces of gold in this year’s first quarter, twice the amount poured during that time period in 2013, company numbers show. The increase was four times bigger for silver, with more than 50,000 ounces poured.

MOVING FORWARD

So for those who want mining only in Storey County history books, what does the future hold?

Toll suggests keeping heavy industry in its already designated area: the 110,000-acre Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. The county promotes it as the largest park of its kind in the United States.

The industrial park, in the McCarran community along Interstate 80 between Sparks and Fernley, is home to distribution operations for companies including Toys R Us, PetSmart and Wal-Mart. The park recycles water for industrial use and some warehouses move products mainly with robots that operate through a series of bar codes that direct them where to go.

Storey County human resources director Austin Osborne, who formerly handled planning for the county, said the opening of the park in 2000 was a “rebirth” for an area known for pushing technology’s limits.

“You can go to Virginia City and step back in time,” Osborne said. “Then you can travel 40 minutes to the industrial park and get the most cutting-edge and modern things that are going on in the United States today, or even the world.”

And maybe that’s what a Storey County boom looks like in 2014.

Contact reporter Adam Kealoha Causey at acausey@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0401. Follow on Twitter @akcausey.