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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The lakeside Thunderbird Lodge estate, built by multimillionaire George Whittell in 1936, is one of the last and best examples of residential architecture on Lake Tahoe in the days when wealthy San Francisco Bay Area residents built summer homes at the blue mountain lake.

The property was Whittell’s playground, with exotic animal cages and barns, a separate poker cottage and secret passageways cut through granite. At one time, the millionaire owned most of the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, and today, the retreat remains his legacy.

The Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society conducts tours and special events at the site, which it pledges to protect and preserve for the public. The society has raised more than half the $10 million it needs to preserve the Thunderbird Lodge National Historic District, thanks to a major gift from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. The work involves restoring...

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Nevada’s history is filled with tales of visionaries who saw an oasis in the desert, a gem in the mountains or an opportunity in times of want. The tales live on, but it’s rare to experience these tales first-hand, in living color.

Visitors to Nevada are fortunate to still be able to witness the vision of famous Broadway dancer Marta Becket on her own stage in the Amargosa Valley. Becket’s story is an unusual one, but the best stories always are.

While on vacation with her husband in 1967, Becket wandered into the Amargosa Valley on the eastern edge of Death Valley and never left. A flat tire halted their trip and gave the curious dancer time to wander the ramshackle buildings of Death Valley Junction. As she strolled the dusty road, she came across an abandoned old theater. Peering through a hole in...

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The Smith Cornelius Hotel in Caliente, a historic railroad town in southeastern Nevada, was recently listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The National Register is the nation’s official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation.

The Smith Hotel was most likely built in 1918 or 1919, since a newspaper advertisement dated 1919 promotes the Royal Cafe, located on the first floor of the hotel. Dr. and Mrs. J. Wesley Smith built the hotel and operated it until 1921 when the business was bought by W.W. Stockham. By 1928, the management had changed hands again, to Mrs. H. M. J. Cornelius, but the hotel was still called the Smith Hotel. Sometime after 1928 but before 1969, the name was changed to Scott Hotel. The Scott Hotel went out of business in approximately 1978.

Completion of the Pioche Branch of the railroad in 1907...

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