Thanksgiving on the Comstock, Then and Now
Thanksgiving has been part of life on the Comstock for more than 150 years. The earliest Nevada papers—the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City and the Gold Hill Daily News—carried annual reminders each November that the holiday mattered here. Nevada formally recognized Thanksgiving as a state holiday in 1864, declared by the state’s first governor, Henry G. Blasdel, and soon after, the local papers began reflecting that new tradition. Throughout the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s, the Enterprise and the Daily News printed the Governor’s annual Thanksgiving Proclamation, calling residents to “refrain from labor,” gather with family and friends, and set aside the day for gratitude. This ritual, repeated year after year in our own local press, tells us something important: Thanksgiving wasn’t an afterthought on the Comstock. It was embraced.
Dining notices in the Gold Hill Daily News show that boarding houses, hotels, and restaurants across Gold Hill and Virginia City served special holiday meals—roast fowl, potatoes, preserved fruits, relishes, cakes, and the pies so central to Victorian American celebrations. And thanks to the astonishing speed of 19th-century supply chains, oysters appeared on Comstock Thanksgiving tables, too. As a Los Angeles Times historical feature notes, residents here in the 1870s were “crazy about oysters,” which arrived by rail in remarkable quantities and showed up in soups, stuffings, pies, and holiday spreads. A miner in 1874 might very well have had oyster stew as the first course of his Thanksgiving dinner.
Yet even then, the holiday was less about the specific dishes and more about the spirit behind them. For miners far from home, merchants who stayed open through the holiday, and families carving out lives in these rugged hills, Thanksgiving offered a moment of comfort and community. A warm seat at a hotel table, a shared meal in a boarding house, or a family gathering in a small hillside kitchen provided just enough softness to balance the demands of Comstock life.
Today, our celebrations look different—pies exchanged in driveways, recipes shared across town or via text, turkeys picked up at the grocery store, and casseroles assembled in kitchens warmed by modern stoves. Our mom-and-pop shops donate rolls and desserts for community meals, help families gather last-minute ingredients, and show the same quiet generosity that kept this region
together in the Victorian era. Some neighbors invite an unexpected traveler to join their table; others make room for those who might not have anywhere else to go—not out of pity, but out of the same instinct that defined the Comstock from the start: if you’re here, you’re welcome.
The details have changed. The heart has not.
From the pages of the Territorial Enterprise to the boardwalks of today’s Virginia City and streets of Dayton, Thanksgiving on the Comstock has always been about gathering, sharing, and remembering what we’re grateful for. Whether the meal is filled with old family recipes or new traditions, whether the table is crowded or intimate, the thread that connects us across time is unmistakable.
May this year’s table carry that continuity—between past and present, between the Victorian kitchens that once dotted these hills and the warm homes of our modern community. Gratitude is still the foundation of the Comstock. It always has been.
— Interim Editor, The Comstock Chronicle
