The Most Interesting Town on the Loneliest Road in America

Story and Photographs by Tom Straka

The July 1986 issue of Life magazine had a theme of "America, the Wonderous," and included an article on "America, the Most," highlighting, "superlatively speaking" some of America's most surprising places. One was "the loneliest road" in America, U.S. Highway 50, which runs across Nevada from Lake Tahoe on the west to Great Basin National Park on the east. The article warned the road was desolate and drivers ought to have "survival skills," prompting the state to publish a "survival guide," and will issue a certificate to anyone who manages to navigate it (by getting stamps on a "passport" at each town on the route. The article claimed there were "no points of interest" on the route, which was an exaggeration, as there are plenty for the adventurous.

Arguably, the most interesting town on the route is Eureka. As you'd expect in Nevada, it was established as a mining town. Nevada is best known for the huge Comstock Lode silver mines near Virginia City, but Eureka was the state's second richest silver-lead producer. The Comstock ores were rich and required no smelting, but the central Nevada ores required smelting, and Eureka would become one of the nation's largest smelting towns, gaining the name "Pittsburgh of the West" in the 1870s. It would have six smelting companies operating sixteen furnaces, smelting the output of fifty mines, which consumed about sixteen thousand bushels of charcoal daily when operating at full capacity, and after a few years there was no wood within fifty miles of Eureka.

Eureka's draw is mid-nineteenth century mining history, and a significant part of that history relates to the huge demand for charcoal fuel. Charcoal burning was an immense subsidiary industry creating its own interesting problems. One problem became a part of state history: the "Charcoal Burners' War" or the "Italian War," named for the main immigrant group comprising the charcoal burners. Charcoal was the costliest element of the smelting process and the smelting companies worked hard to keep the price of charcoal down, resulting in agitation over the price of a bushel of charcoal. In 1879 a charcoal strike resulted in the "massacre" of five charcoal burners near town. The Eureka County Cemetery on the hill behind the courthouse contains the graves of the charcoal burners, including a memorial.  

Most mining boomtowns don't survive; Eureka is an exception, as what the locals call "The Friendliest Town on the Loneliest Road." The town has preserved and restored the mining history, creating a great opportunity for history buffs, but, at the same time, plenty of hotel, restaurant, and shopping opportunities. The best way to see the town is to follow the self-guided walking tour with 62 marked locations. Before you cringe at 62 locations, they concentrated in a few city blocks, quite close together. Raine's Market published a second version of the walking tour. Some of my favorite locations are below, with descriptions from the walking tours.

Some of My Favorites Mostly from the Walking Tour

The Eureka Opera House and Jackson House Hotel are next to each other. The opera house was built in 1880, and the hotel was built in 1877 and rebuilt in 1880 after a fire. The opera house is one of the best-restored and usable opera houses in Nevada. It has a capacity of over 300 and is one of two theaters in Nevada with a horseshoe-shaped balcony. It still hosts music and community events. The hotel has eight elegant Victorian bedrooms upstairs and also operates as a restaurant and bar. It is supposedly haunted (you might have watched Zak Bagans investigate the hotel on Ghost Adventures).

The Eureka Opera House with the adjacent Jackson House Hotel, across from the Court House.

The Eureka County Courthouse was built in 1879-1880 (being added to already existing jail), has served as the courthouse since, and sits in the middle of town. The edifice received a structural facelift in 1995, but its interior still displays some original furniture and walk-in vaults. The doors are six-inch-thick iron and have lovely summer scenes painted on them. A suspended gallery at the rear can seat 100. The semi-circle witness box is distinctive because of its shape and location in front of the judge's bench. The second-floor courtroom is recognized as the best preserved in Nevada. 

The Eureka County Courthouse, worth exploring.

The Eureka Sentinel Museum was built in 1879 from locally-fired brick and housed the Eureka Sentinel Newspaper until 1960. The museum contains the original pressroom and equipment from its newspaper days. Upstairs are items representative of Eureka and there is a gift shop downstairs. Many of the posters on the wall date to the 1880s.

The Eureka Sentinel Museum, more than a newspaper museum, with plenty of city history.

The Colonnade Hotel was originally built as a meeting house for the Italian Benevolent Society in 1880. By 1890 it was vacant.  In the 1940s it was converted into a boarding house and hotel. Today, it is one of the premier accommodations in Eureka.

The Colonnade Hotel, accommodations in the heart of things.

The General Store. This brick building was built in 1882 as the Ottawa Hotel to replace an earlier frame structure.  For many years, into the twenty-first century, it served as a grocery and general store. In the 1920s it served as a Shell Oil Company gas station and in the 1940s as a Union 76 gas station in the 1940s.

The General Store, there are plenty of buildings in town with a ghost town flavor.

The Tannehill Log Cabin, built in 1864, is believed to be the first house in Eureka. It was built by the Tannehill brothers who lived in it for about a year. It was built from limber pine logs cut from the higher elevation forests from around Eureka. It also served as Eureka's first store. Fires, floods, and the ravages of time have spared the cabin, and local residents take justifiable pride in the fact that they have been able to save it.

The Tannehill Log Cabin, probably the first house in Eureka.

The Eureka & Palisade Train Car. This crew car is the only piece of rolling stock left in Eureka County from the Eureka & Palisade Railroad. The narrow-gauge railroad began in 1875 when Eureka businessmen formed a railroad company. It was built to haul ore refined by Eureka's smelters 90 miles to Palisade on the transcontinental railroad line. It also hauled charcoal into Eureka from charcoal kilns along the line. The crew car served as sleeping quarters for men working on the railroad.

The Eureka & Palisade Railroad connected Eureka to the outside world. As a mining town its important task was to export refined ore and import charcoal to fuel the smelters. 

The Eureka Inn and Saloon. Built in 1873, it is the oldest operating business building in Eureka and is made of local quarried volcanic tuff. A pharmacy and grocery have operated in the building. A motel was on the southern side. Today it houses Afterlife Antiques & Oddities. Beneath are sections of the city's underground "cathedral" or catacomb tunnels.  

The Eureka Inn and Saloon is the oldest business building still operating in Eureka. There is access below it to the city's underground tunnels.

Ghost Town Appearance. Eureka is well preserved in most places, but a few areas are less well preserved, and the opportunity exists to get images that appear to be from ghost towns. These are scattered around town, mostly at the edges. A couple of miles west of Eureka is the Ruby Hill mining area, a real ghost town, with lots of deserted buildings and abandoned mining equipment. Ruby Hill Avenue leads uphill to the area and the road is paved the whole way.  

Above Eureka is the Ruby Hill mining area, with an opportunity to see both deserted mining buildings and equipment, but also some ghost town type buildings.

While there are plenty of ghost town type houses and buildings in the town, Ruby Hill has some good ones also.

Ruby Hill has lots of interesting leftover mining debris scattered around the area.

The Slag Pile. While Riby Hill is the best option to see some mining history, a bit of the smelting history of the town remains on Main Street on the southern side of town. The Nevada Historical Marker in town notes that when smelter production ceased in 1891, their sites were "marked by the huge slag piles at both ends of Main Street." Across from the General Store is the one which is part of the walking tour. Slag is a glassy non-metallic waste byproduct formed from the smelting process. This slag pile is a small portion of waste from the Richmond Consolidated smelting plant (1871) which was near this site. The ditch for the smoke stack flume of the smelter can still be seen here.

You don't have to go above town to Ruby Hill to see mining artifacts. They are "hidden" all over town. Both sides of town have huge slag piles left over from the town's smelters.

Charcoal Burners in Town

As the smelters in Eureka used more and more charcoal, the woodlands around Eureka became denuded of trees. By 1879 charcoal burners had to move their operations farther and farther from town, increasing their transportation costs. The charcoal burners urgently needed a price increase for their charcoal; smelter owners, faced with a declining market for lead and silver, attempted to hold the price steady. After contentious negotiation, the charcoal burners decided to strike and stop charcoal production, which would close the smelters. A sheriff's posse ended up killing five of the charcoal burners, ending the "Charcoal Burners' War." There is still plenty of evidence of that "war" in town.

The Tognini and Company Building. This building was constructed in 1877 by the Tognini Company, a Swiss-Italian company. It was Eureka Billiard Hall and Saloon in its early years. It was also the headquarters of one of Eureka's largest charcoal production companies.

The Tognini and Company Building is more hidden history. There has been much written about the "Charcoal Burners' War" (a recent book on the War is Charcoal and Blood by Silvio Manno). Evidence of the charcoal industry is scattered all over town.

The Celso Tolli's Saloon. This building was constructed in the 1870s by Italian stone masons and later acquired by Celso Tolli, a prosperous Italian entrepreneur. It is noteworthy as the location of a large meeting on July 6, 1879, where hundreds of Italian charcoal burners met and formed the Eureka Charcoal Burners Protective Association, also known as the Carbonari. The union was created to confront what the Carbonari considered low and unfair charcoal price. The Carbonari went on strike on August 9, 1879, leading to the "Charcoal Burners' War." This was a central location for the activities that led up to the "war."    

Celso Tolli's Saloon and the center of "insurrection."

The Diamond City Charcoal Kiln. Evidence of the charcoal burners' activities lie in the hills surrounding Eureka. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has preserved one of the many remnants of charcoal kilns about 20 miles northeast of Eureka.

A charcoal kiln north of Eureka. More evidence of the "Charcoal Burners' War. It is a beautiful site to visit, and the kiln is fully intact, but you'll need a high-clearance SUV to visit it. The BLM sign near the charcoal kiln says: "Built around 1869, this structure produced charcoal for the thirteen smelters around Eureka. By 1891 the entire area visible from tis location was denuded of trees, as five acres of timber were required for each firing. One charge produced 1400 bushels of charcoal, for which Swiss-Italian workers received 27¢ per bushel."

The Eureka County Cemetery contains a memorial to the five charcoal burners who lost their lives in the "war." The gravesite is downhill and to the left from the gate.

Eureka has several cemeteries and all of them have history in them.

Memorial and grave marker for the five slain charcoal burners.

The Walking Tour hits all of the major buildings and mining history. But not listed on the walking tour are dozens of artifacts simply sprinkled around town. Most are from the mining activity. They add to the living history aspect of the walking tour.

Lots of interesting things are not on the official walking tour.  

Author/Photographer. Tom Straka is an emeritus professor of forestry at Clemson University in South Carolina. He has an interest in history, forestry and natural resources, natural history, and the American West.

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