The Heart of Town Life - Nevada Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Dayton history sign #5 in front of the old Dayton Grammar School at intersection of Logan Aly and Shady Lane in Dayton, NV. Marker deals with the history of Dayton Grammar School.


School Days and All Around Town
The Dayton Grammar School, now the Dayton Museum, was built in 1865 and is the oldest school structure in Nevada still located at its original site.
The grammar school was the heart of the community — the place where people gathered for town meetings, attended holiday festivities, and voted on Election Days.
According to local lore, students in the 1920s locked their teacher in the outhouse. They piled sagebrush around the structure and lit it on fire, but the teacher was quickly released unharmed. It is no wonder schoolteachers in those days kept and used hefty homemade wooden paddles.
As late as the 1950s, the schoolhouse had no indoor plumbing or running water. Citing poor sanitation, parents held a public protest and the school closed in 1959. Students were moved down the street to the former Dayton High School.
Abandoned, except for occasional meetings or Sunday school, the grammar school structure remained vacant until 1979, when it became home to Dayton’s first senior center. When a new senior citizen facility opened in 1991, Dayton’s history buffs formed a historical society, raised money, and created a museum in the schoolhouse to preserve Dayton’s history for future generations.

Dayton’s History
Welcome to Dayton’s Historic Sector
In 1849, a pack train of Mormons traveling to California’s goldfields camped near what is today the town of Dayton while waiting for the Sierra snow to melt. Their guide, Abner Blackburn, discovered Nevada’s first gold at the mouth of the canyon. News spread to California. By 1851, hundreds of gold-seekers had swamped into Gold Canon, where a tent city grew and ultimately became the town that was formally named Dayton in 1861.
Blackburn’s gold find led to the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City in 1859, then to the creation of the Nevada Territory in 1861, and finally to statehood for Nevada in 1864.
Take a trip back in time: Close your eyes. Imagine it is 1853. Dayton’s Pike and Main Streets are dusty overland emigrant trails teeming with pioneers, some on horseback, others on foot or riding atop oxen-drawn covered wagons, many of them had traveled nearly 2,000 miles on their trek toward California.
Dayton’s rousing history is revealed through photographs and narrative on five historical kiosks located around town and in the Dayton Museum. (See their locations below.)

Dayton’s Historical Highlights:
**Home to Native Americans for thousands of years prior to Eruo-American emigration.
**Site of Nevada’s first documented gold discovery in 1849 at the mouth of Gold Canon, where Dayton began.
**Site of Nevada’s first cemetery, established in the 1850s in what was then lower Carson Valley, Utah Territory.
**Nevada’s earliest permanent Euro-American settlement, inhabited since at least 1851.
**Site of first Chinese settlement in Nevada, 1857.
**Site pf Pony Express stop called Nevada, 1860-1861. (See original rock wall and monument, Pike and Main Streets.)
**Lyon County’s first county seat, 1861.
**America’s first transcontinental interstate, the Lincoln Highway, passed through Old Town Dayton.

Marker Title (required): The Heart of Town Life Marker Text (required): Photo Captions The “Misfits” movie, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, was filmed in the Odeon Hall and Saloon in 1960. It was Monroe’s and Gable’s last movie. Gable died just two weeks after the filming, and Monroe died two years later. The Ice Harvest Men harvest ice from a commercial ice pond on the Carson River. Before the advent of refrigeration in Dayton, blocks of ice were stored in an icehouse at the corner of Main Street and River Street. When summer arrived, residents could purchase ice, which they stored (bundled in straw to keep it frozen) in small barns near their homes. A Pioneer Cemetery Arriving in horse-drawn buggies, mourners attend a funeral at the Dayton Cemetery sometime prior to 1905. (See Old Town Dayton, the Carson River, and Dayton Valley in the background. The Emigrant Trail ran north of the cemetery.) The miner for whom Virginia City was named, James “Old Virginny” Finney, died in Dayton in 1861 and is buried here. His grave marker reveals a miner’s story. A number of famous Nevadans found their final resting place in this cemetery. Emigrant Trail Crossing Dayton’s old town sector grew where two emigrant trails crossed at Main Street and Pike Street. Looking was down Main Street you see the bridge over the Carson River. Pike Street runs north between the first two building on the left. On the right (south side of the street) is the Union Hotel. Notice the electrical poles along Main Street, electricity arrived in Dayton in 1905. Main and Pike Streets were part of the Lincoln Highway’s Pioneer Carson Route, completed in 1919. The tow-story Quality Mercantile Building (on the left) burned to the ground in the early 1980s School Days Dayton Grammar School students pose for a school photo, circa 1892. Built of hand-hewn stone, the one-room school was completed in 1865. Its original slate blackboards, plastered walls, and pine floor remains in the old school, now the Dayton Museum. An Engineering Marvel Visitors gathered at the Sutro Tunnel portal in its heyday (1880s). Starting in 1869, Adolph Sutro, a future mayor of San Francisco, built a four-mile tunnel from the Dayton Valley to Virginia City to drain hot water from the Comstock mines. By the time the tunnel was completed in 1878, the mining boom had nearly ended. North of Dayton proper, a modern subdivision is located at the site of the old Sutra City, a community of 800 in the 1870s. The tunnel’s portal site, located in the foothills behind the Sutra Elementary School, is privately owned. A Beloved Chinese Immigrant Garfield is pictured in a cookhouse for Chinese workers where he cooked for William and Andrew Walmsley at their wood and coal camp at Plemont, a tiny settlement south of Dayton. He returned to China about 1901. While en route back home to Dayton a few months later, he died two days out of San Francisco. His history, written on the back of the original photograph by Zenas Walmsley, notes that “Garfield was thought very highly of by everyone who knew him.” Zenas’s father Andrew settled in Lyon County in 1859. County (required): Lyon Marker Type (required): Other (describe below) Other Marker Type (optional): Fiberglass sign Is Marker Damaged? (required): No Other Damage Type (optional): NA Marker Number (If official State Marker from NV SHPO website above, otherwise leave blank): Not Listed URL - Website (optional): Not listed

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