So What's So Special About Virginia City?
Guest Contributor: C. LXI Yearzago, Keeper of the Tribal Knowledge
From the earliest of times, 1860s, some of the people that would later be the most wealthy and influential people in the US and even in the world were investors in the Comstock mining activities. Most people have no idea what various points of impact that the Comstock had on our country, and in several instances, on the entire world.
Early on it was dubbed “The Richest Place on Earth” for its fantastic wealth producing gold and silver and its potential for such production into the future.
George Hearst, a prevalent early highly successful investor, later founded what became the Hearst newspaper chain still in business today, 150 years later.
As the mining industry continued, a German born engineer developed what is called the “square set timbering system” to support the massive ore cavities down in the depths of the Comstock mines. This timbering system is still in use today in underground mining operations all over the world. The famous Cornish water pumps that made mining on the Comstock possible at all by pumping the water from the depths of the mines.
William Ralston, the owner of the Bank of California, at one point owned and controlled approximately 95% of all the mining assets on the Comstock. The Bank of California (Wm. Ralston) would be one of the primary investors in the real estate market in the San Francisco area. The Bank of California would, many years later, be purchased and become the Bank of America.
In the early 1870s, the four individuals that would become known as the “Silver Kings” (John Mackay, Wm. Fair, Wm. Flood, and James O’Brien) would begin an investment and buy out program that eventually pushed the Bank of California packing back to California. They opened the Nevada Bank of San Francisco in Virginia City. Mackay later formed the company that laid the first Transatlantic Telegraph cable from New York to Europe. Fair and Flood invested their money in San Francisco real estate, which is part of how the phrases that Virginia City built San Francisco came about.
Wells Fargo Bank got its start right here in Virginia City. It was located in two different locations in town. The last location was on South C Street approximately where the current Comstock Creamery (old Firehouse Barbeque) is located.
Adolph Sutro sold out his tunnel drainage operation in the 1870s, and went to San Francisco to invest in real estate. He built a rail trolley from downtown out to the ocean beach as well as many other major developments in San Francisco.
Money made from investments by the likes of Crocker, Stanford, Huntington and Hopkins kept them moving on their quest to build the Central Pacific transcontinental railroad which, on completion, ran across Nevada and through Reno.
The silver produced by the Comstock warranted the establishment of a U.S. Mint in Carson City. The coinage produced there is, today, among the most collectible and valuable coinage in the world.
And, how can we forget Mark Twain, the man that honed his writing skills in Virginia City and went onto change the face of American literature to this very day.
