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Tonopah, Nevada
Calendar of Annual Events
FEBRUARY
Elks Crab Crack
A long time local favorite 775-482-3358
MARCH
St. Patrick's Day Dinner & Dance
Everyone is invited775-482-6746
MAY
Jim Butler Days
This is the grand-daddy of all Tonopah celebrations, held over Labor Day Weekend775-482-3859
Welcome to Tonopah
Lodging
& Casino Hotels
BEST WESTERN HI-DESERT INN
Highways 95 & 6. 482-3511. Come to the Best Western Hi-Desert Inn
for a very clean comfortable room with very friendly service. We are open
24 hours. We serve coffee and some kind of goody every morning in our office.
We look forward to serving you some at the Best Western Hi-Desert Inn.
JIM BUTLER MOTEL
100 S. Main Street. 1-800-635-9455. A friendly greeting with friendly
prices at our AAA approved motel in the heart of Tonopah Relax in large,
homey rooms while planning your ghost town sightseeing or deciding where
to dine at the many nearby restaurants. Our family has proudly served the
public for more than 90 years in Tonopah.
THE SILVER QUEEN MOTEL
255 S. Main St. 482-6291. 85 spacious, economically priced rooms located
in the heart of historic mining town, Tonopah, Nevada. Walking distance from
the Convention Center. On premise pool, restaurant, lounge and antique-gift
shop. WeÍll help with local touring information. Our staff loves to
make your stay pleasant and full of smiles.
THE STATION HOUSE
Casino Hotel at the upper end of town on Highway 95. 482-9777. Halfway
between Las Vegas and Reno youÍll find reflections of the past with
modern day conveniences. We offer 128 slot machines, three 21 tables, full
menu restaurant and live music at the bar six days a week. Fresh-baked goodies
at the bakery, and a 20 full-hookup RV site.
THE SUNDOWNER MOTEL
700 N. Highway 95. 482-6224. We have a friendly staff that will greet
you with a smile and make you feel welcome. We also have a laundry room,
restaurant, weight room, kitchenettes, and pets are welcome. We're open 24
hours, HBO is free and our rooms are Air Force clean inspected. Come stay
with us!
A brief History & Description of
Tonopah, Nevada
by
David W. Toll
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Tonopah is a living exhibit, a 20th century mining city.
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TONOPAH SPRANG TO LIFE IN
1900 following a silver discovery made by Jim Butler. Butler was an energetic
and efficient miner, but he has been described as the laziest mining tycoon
of all time because of his practice of giving leases to others to develop
his properties. The leasers, working against deadlines, established Tonopah
as a major mining bonanza by taking $4 million in ore from Butler's mines
and building a substantial city.
Coming as it did when the
mining excitement at Nome, Alaska, was tailing off, the Tonopah strike drew
a large number of sourdoughs, among them Tex Rickard, Wyatt Earp, and Key
Pittman. The Tonopah boom also coincided with the last waning of the Comstock
as the center of political and economic influence in Nevada. For more than
a generation afterward Tonopah men managed much of the state's affairs. Key
Pittman went to the U.S. Senate where he was known as "The Senator from Tonopah"
because of his vigorous support of monetary legislation designed to assist
the silver mining industry of the West. Tasker Oddie, Jim Butler's attorney,
was both a U.S. senator and a Nevada governor. Earp made himself useful as
a gambling dealer and "persuader" in local politics; even in his fifties
he was not a man to fool with, though the dent he made in Tonopah history
is nothing like his previous impact on Tombstone, Arizona.
Two years after its
establishment Tonopah was a sprawling city of 3,000 people served by
stagecoaches, competing newspapers, more than 30 saloons, and a pair of churches.
By 1905 it had captured the county seat from failing Belmont; by 1907 Tonopah
was thriving with five banks, several theaters, numerous hotels, five newspapers,
many of the most impressive residences in Nevada in its extensive residential
neighborhoods, and the Big Casino, a dance-hall-and-brothel occupying a square
city block in the middle of the sporting district.
Like Austin forty years
previously, Tonopah became the headquarters and fitting-out place for hundreds
of prospectors prowling the brushy wilderness of central Nevada, and whose
discoveries helped raise Nevada from the economic coma it had been suffering
for 20 years. They also restored the state to its accustomed place on the
front pages of the nation's newspapers. Tonopah peaked in the years leading
up to World War I, when the mines averaged 38.5 million a year in production.
From there it was a long,
slow downhill slide. As the twenties gave way to the thirties, and the thirties
to the forties, mining slowed and finally stopped. Ranching and the highway
trade became the main economic resources. Population dwindled and for 50
years of hard times the increasingly shabby city clung to the barren swale
between Mounts Oddie and Brougher, half awake and distracted. It was silver
the old city wanted, with three shifts a day in the shafts and half a hundred
hammering mills crushing rock all day and all night.
And in 1979, after nearly
60 years of decline, Tonopah erupted in its second mining boom of the 20th
century. Suddenly the Mizpah Annex Cafe was a crush of men in Air Force fatigues
or the flannel shirts and blue jeans of construction workers and miners.
Waitresses raced from table to table with pots of coffee and platters of
flapjacks.
Fleets of buses hauled
the men out of town to work. Nine hundred of them were building the great
new Anaconda molybdenum mine and mill, and hundreds more worked in a dozen
gold and silver mines producing bullion at a furious rate. The Air Force
was so busy at its missile test range beyond the mountains to the southeast
that it had to lease whole motels in Tonopah to accommodate the troops.
The population went from
fewer than 2,500 to more than 4,000 in about a year. When school was out
in June, 1980, there were 475 kids enrolled in school. When school opened
again in September, there were more than 700 students to find classrooms
and teachers for. At the only grocery store in town the clerks worked steadily
to restock the shelves with almost 6 tons of groceries every day, and customers
idled their cars in the street, waiting for spaces to open up in the parking
lot.
Every structure with a
roof over it was rented. A temporary 300-space campground was built at the
Anaconda worksite. Every vacant lot that could accommodate a trailer was
put to use, giving the tangle of old streets an incongruous look: a flamingo-pink
aluminum cube stuck between a swaybacked old cottage on one side and a fitted
stone mansion on the other.
On the northeast side of
town Anaconda built a 500-acre subdivision of new homes, with a new school
and a park so their permanent employees wouldn't have to live in their cars.
The rattle of hammers and the snarl of saws was heard everywhere in town,
and workers from Reno, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Sacramento stood in
line at the pay phones after work every night to call home. Plans of every
optimistic kind were announced one after another, and one Friday afternoon
over coffee at Terry's Family Restaurant on Main Street I watched a man float
from booth to booth around the room, keeping five separate deals going at
once.
And then one day the boom
was over. The price of gold and silver slid and the mines closed down. The
market for moly went so bad that even mighty Anaconda had to close down its
operation and sit on its $240 million investment. The Air Force got enough
of its base built to move the men inside, and then encouraged them to stay
there. Tonopah slowed right down again.
And although the dust has
settled now, Tonopah will never be the same. The clearest symbol of this
transformed city is the Mizpah Hotel at the center of the city. Built in
1907 and '08 on the site of one of Jim Butler's camping sites, the five story
hotel was immediately the center of glamour and elegance in dusty, hard-working
Tonopah. It had steam heat, electric lights and elevator service, and advertised
itself earnestly as "The Finest Stone Hotel on the Desert." When a husky
young roustabout named Jack Dempsey strode into the flourishing Mizpah six
years later, Tonopah was at its peak.
Inevitably, the Mizpah
slipped into poverty along with the rest of the city during the long decline.
It livened up briefly during World War II when the Air Base was busy training
bomber crews, but this flicker of prosperity ended with the war. In 1950
new owners erected the now familiar lights on the roof. The lobby area was
remodeled to accommodate a small casino and cocktail bar, but the economic
tide was still running the wrong way. By the late 1960s an inside room (in
which the window opened onto the corridor, rather than to the outside) rented
for $2.50 a night. With a bare bulb dangling from a frayed cord, and a swaybacked
metal bed hugging the wall for support, these rooms were great favorites
with cowboys sleeping off a payday Saturday night.
But a kid from Las Vegas
had fallen in love with the historic brick and stone structure while traveling
to a high school track meet in Yerington in 1937. Nearly 40 years later,
as the president of a multi-million dollar construction company and builder
of the Union Plaza Hotel at the head of Glitter Gulch in downtown Las Vegas,
he bought it. In 1979, after three years and $4 million, the glamorous old
hotel, its rooms and suites furnished with antiques, opened like a glittering
jewel box to preside in splendor over the boom that was just beginning.
Alas, the mining boom
transformed it from luxurious getaway to a busy commercial hotel. Then the
mining slowdown transformed it to a slightly rundown commercial hotel. It's
presently closed.
A better symbol of the
recent boom may be the Scolari's supermarket at the south end of town, which
brought old Tonopah all the way into the 20th century. Next door, the modern
new Station House houses a collection of antique slot machines and gambling
devices, gleaming in their cases like sculpture.
But the best symbol of
all is the new community sports complex a short distance out Radar Road on
Tonopah's north side, with swimming pool, exercise rooms, handball courts
and other work-out facilities, all brand-new and first class. It was a farewell
gift from the Anaconda company, as generous a gesture as any mining company
has ever made, and it's open to the public. This facility, the Station House
and other development stemming from the boom, make Tonopah more accommodating
to visitors than ever.
The mining and military
boom left Tonopah with a large number of new motels - the Jim Butler Motel
across the street from the Mizpah was designed and factory-built in modules,
trucked to town and erected in two days. The modern Hi-Desert Inn, Silver
Queen and Sundowner motels are all on Main Street.
You can spend half a day
exploring the old neighborhoods and you can spend a lifetime exploring the
beautiful country nearby. Be sure to visit the Central Nevada Historical
Society Museum. You'll see it on Logan Field Road on the south side of town.
Relics and memorabilia of Central Nevada are displayed in spacious quarters,
meticulously and lovingly preserved. Slide shows on local history are available,
and antique mining machinery decorates the parking lot.
A 70-acre Historic Mining
Park is presently being devloped at the original discovery site at the end
of McCulloch Street on the east side of town. The remaining structures and
underground works of four old mines are being restored to working condition,
with exhibits, displays and a Visitor Center planned for the 1905 Tonopah
Mining Company power house. Check on progress at the Museum.
Tonopah has a swimming
pool and a lawned park with playground and picnic tables. Barsanti Park,
named for the Fighting General from Tonopah, is at Bryan and Booker Streets.
A couple of smaller parks can be easily found in the Anaconda subdivision
off Radar Road, and Jim Butler Park overlooks the town from the east.
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