For history buffs, one of the best volunteer opportunities in Western Nevada is offered by the Dangberg Home Ranch in Carson Valley.

Volunteers sort through thousands of meticulously saved artifacts, often stored in their original boxes and many not seen for almost a century. They can read and be touched by letters from family members to friends and would-be lovers—missives that look as if they were written yesterday, still in their envelopes.

Park volunteers helped organize the April 16-18 spring opening exhibit at the Dangberg Home Ranch Historic Park in Minden.

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The century-old McKeen Motor Car railroad car, the first use of internal combustion in revenue rail service, will emerge from extensive renovation and be available for public rides at a birthday celebration May 9 at the Wabuska Depot.

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Picturesque Virginia City, Nevada’s largest and most famous historic mining town, has been selected among the Top 10 True Western Towns for 2010 by True West magazine.

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Evening gowns dating from the 1900s to the 1930s look ready to wear in front of the Dangberg Home Ranch living room fireplace. Photo by Joyce HollisterElegant evening clothes conjured ghosts of the past at the Dangberg Home Ranch Historic Park’s annual observance of Nevada Day. Beaded silk and sequined dresses were displayed on stands in the living room as if the Dangberg ladies had returned for a party, and a volunteer played classical pieces on the 1916 grand piano.

Rangers and volunteers had readied the house for public viewing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They brought out some of the thousands of artifacts found there, a veritable treasure trove of the 19th and 20th centuries as lived by prosperous Carson Valley ranchers. Now a state historic park, for decades the house had been ravaged by time and weather, not to mention squirrels, raccoons and owls…

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Crystal Van Dee, Curator of Manuscripts for the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas, has written a new book as part of the “Images of America” series by Arcadia Publishing. Working almost entirely in the photo archives of the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas, Van Dee has produced a visual history of Clark County that includes not only the rise of Las Vegas from a small division point on the railroad to a world-renowned resort, but celebrates the “unique, diverse, and little-known aspects of the county’s history.”
This year, 2009, marks the centennial of the creation of Clark County when, as Van Dee writes in her introduction, “political and economic pressure from prominent southern Nevadans” in 1909 persuaded the state legislature to cut Lincoln County in half. Southern Nevada at the time was booming: the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad had...

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