The Crossing
In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold. The day Reno became a town.
Toná Family130 stories. 158 years. A downtown's complete history, told through the people who built it — one fictional family at a time, grounded in documented history. A new story every weekday.
In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold. The day Reno became a town.
Toná FamilyA land speculator from San Francisco arrives at the first Reno lot auction and meets a man who will not be outbid.
Kellerman FamilyThe railroad is finished. Wei Ah Lum hears about it secondhand, from men who weren't there either. He looks at the river and decides to stay.
Ah Lum FamilyOtto Kellerman steps off a train in Reno intending to pass through, and stays to build something that will outlast him.
Kellerman FamilyBridget Fitzgerald arrives in Reno with forty-two dollars and a letter of introduction addressed to a man who has already left for Sacramento.
Fitzgerald FamilyJames Doyle comes down from Virginia City with six years of silver country in his hands and finds Otto Kellerman's saloon exactly where he needs it.
Kellerman & DoyleGuadalupe Morales watches the river rise from his room on First Street and helps a stranger move a chest without being asked.
Morales FamilyMargaret Wells walks up a slope of sagebrush to find a building that is not finished and a university that has not yet opened, and puts her name in a ledger anyway.
Reinholt FamilyThe law arrived in Reno on a Thursday, by telegraph, the same way everything arrived.
Ah Lum & Fitzgerald FamiliesPatrick Reilly had not planned to become a lawyer in a town that barely needed one.
StandaloneRosa Morales heard the river before she saw it.
Morales & Kellerman FamiliesThomas Gray set type the way other men played piano -- by feel, without looking, his fingers finding the right letter in the case before his eyes had finished reading the word.
StandaloneWilla walked to the river the morning after the law was signed and stood where her mother had stood thirty-four years before, watching something be taken.
Washoe FamilyJames Ah Lum watches the Southern Pacific depot from his father's laundry on Christmas Eve, counting trunks and watching trains he has never taken.
Ah Lum FamilyAgnes Park, daughter of a cattle rancher, walks up the hill north of Reno and becomes the first in her family to attend the University of Nevada.
StandaloneHelen Marsh arrived in Reno on the four o'clock train from the east, carrying two trunks, a hatbox, and a marriage she intended to leave on the courthouse steps.
Fitzgerald FamilyGeorge Turk checked the dining room twice before the doors opened, the way he checked everything twice, because in a hotel the difference between good and adequate was the things nobody noticed.
StandaloneNora Gaines, president of a local women's club, navigates the social friction and opportunity created by the influx of wealthy Eastern divorce-seekers.
StandaloneFrances Cole arrived in Reno on a Wednesday in October of 1921 and went directly to her attorney's office, because she was not a woman who wasted time.
StandaloneDolores Park sold a pair of boots to a woman from Connecticut on a Tuesday morning in September, and by the time the woman left the store, she was walking differently.
Morales FamilyFrank Kellerman stood behind the bar on a Friday evening in December of 1918 and poured a whiskey for a cattleman from Lovelock and thought about the fact that in three days he would not be able to do this anymore.
Kellerman FamilyClara Reinholt signed the lease on a Tuesday in March of 1920, standing in the empty storefront on Virginia Street with the landlord and a pen and the particular feeling of a person who has just committed to something that cannot be taken back without cost.
Reinholt FamilyThe ranch sat in a fold of the Truckee Meadows, seven miles south of Reno, at the end of a dirt road that turned off the main highway and ran through sagebrush for a quarter mile before arriving at a gate made of peeled pine poles.
Morales FamilyThe alley ran parallel to Commercial Row, between Sierra and Virginia Streets, and in the years before Prohibition it had been called Douglas Alley, which was the name on the city maps, but during the dry years the people who used it most had taken to calling it Bottle Alley, which was not on any map but was accurate.
Kellerman FamilyThomas Ah Lum stood in the temple at the intersection of First and Lake Streets and listened to the silence. It was a Tuesday morning in October 1926, and he had just finished sweeping the floor around the altar.
Ah Lum FamilyRay Callahan stood in the bed of the truck at dawn, looking at the steel arch that the crews had finished bolting together the night before. It rose at the corner of Commercial Row and Virginia Street like something that had no right to exist in Reno, Nevada.
StandaloneMichael Fitzgerald had been twelve when his grandfather died, and he remembered the funeral more for the rain than for any words spoken over the grave. Now, at twenty-eight, standing in the iron frame of what would be the Riverside Hotel, he understood that Patrick had built something different from what Michael was building.
Fitzgerald FamilySamuel stood on Virginia Street on a Thursday morning in March 1929, watching the men on ladders bolting new letters to the arch. The steel frame had been there since 1926, spelling RENO in electric lights at the intersection of Commercial Row.
Washoe FamilyJoseph Toná walked down Virginia Street on a Thursday night in March 1931, the desert wind carrying the smell of sage and disturbed earth. The Bank Club was lit up like something out of a magazine, its windows blazing.
Washoe FamilyFrank Kellerman stood outside the Reno National Bank on a Tuesday morning in November 1932 and watched the line grow. It stretched from the front entrance on Virginia Street past the druggist and around the corner toward Commercial Row, maybe sixty people deep and getting longer by the minute. Some of the people in line he recognized. The man who ran the shoe repair on Center Street.
Kellerman FamilyRosa Morales heard the news on the radio in the kitchen of the Golden Hotel, standing over a pot of beans with a wooden spoon in her hand and the evening service an hour away. The Twenty-first Amendment had been ratified. National Prohibition was over. It was December 5, 1933, a Tuesday, and the country was allowed to drink again.
Morales FamilyFrances Cole walked into the new Federal Building on South Virginia Street on a Monday in October 1934, carrying two envelopes and the small persistent ache in her left hip that had started the previous winter and had not gone away. The building was unlike anything else in Reno. She stopped inside the entrance and looked up.
StandaloneClara Reinholt noticed the new club on a Wednesday in June 1935, walking north on Virginia Street after closing her dress shop for the evening. It occupied a single storefront, narrow and unremarkable, the kind of space that had been a laundry or a shoe repair before the gambling law changed everything. Through the open door she could see an eight-foot roulette wheel painted in bright colors and a few slot machines along the wall. A man stood outside on the sidewalk, calling to passersby.
Reinholt FamilyNevada Stories draws on the archives of the Historic Reno Preservation Society. If these stories matter to you, consider supporting the people who preserve them.
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