40 Fun Facts About Carson City, Nevada

Which fairground ride was invented by an engineer who grew up in a house in Carson City?

The Ferris wheel was George Ferris Jr.'s answer to the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. His father imported many of the eastern trees planted around the capital.

The Nevada State Prison in Carson City carried out America's first execution by which method in 1924?

The gas chamber was first used there on Gee Jon in February 1924. The penitentiary opened in 1862 and ran for 150 years before it closed in 2012.

Which author arrived in Carson City in 1861 with his brother Orion, the new secretary of Nevada Territory?

Mark Twain, then plain Sam Clemens, came west by stagecoach and later turned the trip into his book Roughing It. Orion often ran the territory when his boss was away.

Which Western star's final film, The Shootist, was set in Carson City and shot partly on location there?

John Wayne used his script approval to move the story from El Paso to Carson City. He played a gunfighter dying of cancer in the 1976 film and never acted on screen again.

Since a 1969 merger, Carson City's limits stretch west over the mountains into which body of water?

Lake Tahoe carries the state line with California, and Carson City's limits run right out to it. Several beaches on the eastern shore sit inside the capital.

Carson City's Nevada Day parade marks a holiday that, until 2000, always fell on which other celebration?

Halloween and statehood share October 31, the day Nevada joined the Union in 1864. Carson City and nearby counties used to hold trick-or-treating on October 30 to avoid the clash.

Carson City belongs to no county, a rare status shared by Baltimore, St. Louis and dozens of cities in which state?

Virginia makes every one of its cities independent of the counties around it. Carson City joined the club in 1969, when it merged with its county and the county ceased to exist.

Much of the vintage equipment at Carson City's Nevada State Railroad Museum was acquired from which unlikely owners?

Hollywood studios had bought the old locomotives and cars to use in movies and television. The museum, opened in 1980, restores them and offers train rides.

For about three decades until 1967, inmates at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City ran which business inside?

A casino nicknamed the Bullpen offered blackjack, craps and poker, with prisoners dealing the games and handling security. It even had its own currency, which is now a collector's item.

Which Nevada city, home to the nearest major airport, lies about 30 miles north of Carson City?

Reno sits about 30 miles up the road, and its airport handles the commercial flights that Carson City's own small regional airfield does not.

Which famous mail service carried its first westbound pouch through Carson City in April 1860, bound for Sacramento?

The Pony Express brought its first westbound pouch into Carson City on April 12, 1860, then raced it over the Sierra. The service went bankrupt within 18 months, beaten by the telegraph.

Which 1859 silver strike in the hills northeast of Carson City turned the wagon-trail stopover into a boomtown?

The Comstock Lode yielded so much ore that Washington built a branch mint in Carson City to coin it. Even so, most of the silver bypassed the capital and went to San Francisco.

Which coin struck with the Carson City Mint's CC mark is especially rare and prized among collectors?

The Morgan dollar from Carson City carries a small CC and sells at a steep premium. The mint struck coins in only 21 years between 1870 and 1893.

The Nevada State Capitol in Carson City was built of which stone, taken free of charge from the state prison quarry?

Sandstone from the prison quarry was meant to keep the 1871 building cheap, yet the final bill of about $170,000 still topped the highest bid the state had turned down.

Which founder of Carson City bought the valley's trading post in 1858 and reserved ten acres for a future capitol?

Abraham Curry was planning a capital before Nevada was even a territory. He went on to run both the mint and the prison, yet legend says he died with a single coin in his pocket.

Nevada's territorial legislature held early meetings in which kind of building, loaned by Carson City's founder?

A hotel built over warm springs east of town served as the lawmakers' meeting hall. The same building then became the territorial prison, with its owner as the first warden.

Carson City's limits touch California; which other US state capital also sits directly on a border with another state?

Trenton faces Pennsylvania across the Delaware River, making it the only other state capital on a state line. Carson City qualifies only because its limits were stretched west in 1969.

Which older Nevada settlement, founded as Mormon Station, was provisional capital before Carson City took over?

Genoa, often billed as Nevada's first settlement, lost the seat of government when the new territory's leaders settled on Carson City. The town is home to the state's oldest bar, opened in 1853.

Carson City became an independent city in 1969 by absorbing which county, named for a major killed in 1860?

Ormsby vanished from the map of Nevada when the merger took effect on April 1, 1969. It had long been little more than Carson City and a few hamlets to the west.

Which Native American people have lived in the Carson City area and the nearby mountains for about 6,000 years?

The Washoe were so closely tied to the region that early settlers called the whole area by their name before the word Nevada took hold.

Which craft made Dat So La Lee, who sold her work through a Carson City clothing store, nationally famous?

Basket weaving brought her national fame during the early 1900s craze for Native baskets. Ten of her pieces belong to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City.

Carson City's Stewart Indian School was named for William Stewart, who secured its funding while holding which office?

A US senator from Nevada, Stewart won the federal money for the boarding school, which opened in 1890. It ran for 90 years, and its campus is now a museum and cultural center.

Which boxer knocked out Gentleman Jim Corbett in Carson City in 1897 to win the world heavyweight title?

Bob Fitzsimmons won in the 14th round with a punch to the body. The film of the fight ran well over an hour, the longest movie made up to that time.

Which Nevada politician, a close friend of Ronald Reagan, played high school basketball in Carson City?

Paul Laxalt, the son of a Basque shepherd, won a state title with Carson High in 1938. The national press later called him the first friend for his closeness to President Reagan.

Until 2012, Carson City was one of only five US state capitals not directly served by what?

An interstate highway finally reached the capital when Interstate 580 was extended into the city limits. It is Carson City's only freeway.

Which numbered road through Carson City did Life magazine dub the Loneliest Road in America?

US Route 50 got the label in 1986 as an insult, and Nevada officials promptly turned it into a marketing pitch. The road runs from California all the way to the Maryland shore.

Which part of Nevada's government still works in Carson City's original Capitol, decades after the others moved out?

The governor kept an office there after the supreme court left in 1937 and the legislature followed in 1971. The second floor now holds historical exhibits.

The marble floors of the Nevada State Capitol in Carson City arrived in 20-ton blocks from which faraway place?

Alaska supplied the marble, which was shipped to San Francisco to be cut and polished before it was laid as floors and wainscoting. The windows were glazed with French crystal.

Which three-time Tour de France winner grew up on ranch land in the valley just north of Carson City?

Greg LeMond spent his boyhood hiking, skiing and fly-fishing there, then in 1986 became the first rider from outside Europe to win the Tour.

Carson City was the seat of which uninhabited Nevada county, created in 1987 around a proposed nuclear waste site?

Bullfrog had no residents at all, so its officers were appointed and its seat lay 270 miles away in Carson City. A court ruled the county unconstitutional, and it was dissolved within two years.

Before it was renamed Carson City in 1858, the trading post on the California Trail went by which name?

Eagle Station took its name from a bald eagle that an early settler shot and pinned to a wall inside the post. The surrounding valley still carries the bird's name.

Which 9,214-foot summit in the Carson Range is the highest point inside Carson City's sprawling limits?

Snow Valley Peak falls inside the capital only because the 1969 merger carried the limits high into the mountains. Three creeks rise on its slopes.

Before 1861, the future Carson City was governed from a capital hundreds of miles to the east as part of what?

Utah Territory ran the valley from Salt Lake City, and settlers who resented its Mormon-led officials campaigned for a government of their own. The result was Nevada Territory.

By 1880, almost a thousand people from which country lived in Carson City, about one for every five white residents?

China was their homeland; many had come to America to build railroads, and some settled in the capital to run businesses and teach school.

Which third baseman, who hit World Series home runs for three different teams, quarterbacked Carson High in Carson City?

Matt Williams homered in the World Series for the Giants, the Indians and the Diamondbacks. The Mets drafted him straight out of Carson High in 1983, but he chose not to sign.

Which explorer named the Carson River after the scout who guided his party through the future Carson City area?

John C. Frémont honored his hired guide, the mountain man Kit Carson, and the capital later borrowed the river's name.

At roughly 4,800 feet in a river valley east of the Sierra, Carson City has which climate classification?

Cold semi-arid suits a capital in the rain shadow of the mountains: four distinct seasons, little rain, and light to moderate snow in winter.

The Nevada State Museum in Carson City displays a silver service of 5,000 ounces made for which kind of vessel?

A battleship, the USS Nevada, was the ship the set was made for, and the silver is lined with gold from the mining town of Goldfield.

A coach kept at Carson City's Nevada State Railroad Museum carried Leland Stanford to which 1869 event?

The golden spike ceremony at Promontory Summit completed the first transcontinental railroad. The coach was built for the Central Pacific and later ran on a Nevada short line as Coach No. 17.

In a tale retold in Roughing It, stagecoach driver Hank Monk raced which newspaper editor out of Carson City?

Horace Greeley, late for a lecture in Placerville, was bounced about so badly that the ride became a Western legend. Monk drove Nevada stages for more than twenty years and died in Carson City.