The University Comes to Reno

Margaret Wells arrived at the depot on a Tuesday in October and could not find anyone who knew exactly where the university was.

She had the address: a bluff north of town, the land that had belonged to a rancher named Evans. Ten acres, the legislative record said, purchased for twelve hundred and fifty dollars. The building was supposed to be finished by spring.

She asked a boy loading freight crates where the university sat, and he pointed vaguely north. “Up the hill,” he said. “Past the Catholic church. You can’t miss it.” He went back to his crates.

She walked.

Reno was smaller than she had expected, or maybe just lower -- low wooden buildings along Virginia Street, the railroad tracks cutting through the middle of everything, men moving quickly with their heads down. She had grown up forty miles south in the Carson Valley, on her father’s stock ranch, and had never spent more than two days at a time in town. The noise of it surprised her, the constant low-frequency business of it. She had thought a university town would feel different from other towns, more deliberate somehow, but Reno in October of 1885 did not feel deliberate. It felt like a place that was still working out what it wanted to be.

She found the building at the top of a long slope of sagebrush and loose gravel. It was three stories, brick and timber, with a mansard roof in the Second Empire style she had seen only in drawings. Two men on scaffolding were working on the cornice. A third stood below watching them and making notes in a ledger. The grounds around the building were bare dirt and scrub. There was no fence, no path, no gate. A stack of lumber sat to one side, not yet used. A wheelbarrow had been left in the middle of the yard as though someone had stepped away for lunch and not come back.

She stood at the edge of the slope and looked at it for a while.

The man with the ledger noticed her and walked over. He was the contractor’s foreman, he said; the architect, a man named Curtis, was up on the scaffold with the cornice men and was not to be bothered. He asked if she was expected.

“I’ve come to enroll,” she said.

He looked at the building and then back at her. “We’re not quite open,” he said. “Spring, most likely. The regents want the roof finished before winter.”

“I can wait,” she said.

He studied her for a moment, then pointed toward the building’s front entrance.

The interior smelled of fresh plaster and pine resin. A man sat at a table near the window, writing. He was the only person in the room. The walls were bare and the floors unfinished, the boards still pale and clean. Light came through windows that had not yet been fitted with curtains.

The superintendent’s name was Jones. He explained that the institution had only recently arrived from Elko, where it had struggled to attract more than thirty students in any single year. The move to Reno was an experiment, he said, in whether a city might do better than a small railroad town for educational purposes. The legislature had approved it the previous spring. Land had been secured. The building was proceeding on schedule.

“How many students do you have?” she asked.

“Currently enrolled: none,” he said. “Opening enrollment is spring. We expect to be ready.”

She looked around the room. Through the window she could see the scaffolding and the men working, and below that the long slope of sagebrush, and at the bottom of it the low buildings of the town, and beyond the town the Truckee Meadows spread wide and flat toward the mountains. It was a clear afternoon and the Sierra was sharp against the sky. She thought she could see, far to the south, the ridge above the Carson Valley. She was probably imagining it.

“I’d like to be among the first,” she said.

He looked up from his papers. He was a careful man, she could tell, the kind who thought before he spoke. “You would need to sit an entrance examination,” he said. “Latin, English composition, arithmetic, geography, and history.”

“I know,” she said. “I have the prospectus.”

She had written away for it six months earlier, after reading a brief notice in the Carson Appeal about the regents’ vote to relocate the university north. Her father had read the same notice and not mentioned it. Her mother had asked what she intended to do afterward. Her older brother had said it was an interesting idea and gone back to his work. She had written to the regents that same afternoon.

Jones told her she could sit the examination in March, when the building would be sufficiently complete. He wrote her name in his ledger: Margaret Wells, Carson Valley, age 19.

She walked back down the slope in the late afternoon. The light was going orange over the Sierra and the town below was beginning to light its lamps. She could see the railroad depot and the courthouse and the two church steeples. She could see the dark line of the Truckee threading through the meadows toward the mountains.

The building behind her was not finished. The faculty had not all been hired. The curriculum had not been settled. She had come several months early and had nothing to show for it except her name in a ledger and an appointment in March.

She thought it was the best thing she had ever done.

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