This article originally appeared in the RGJ on May 9, 2018, the 150th anniversary of Reno’s founding.
On May 9, 1868, more than 1,000 individuals from Virginia City to San Francisco were present in the sagebrush plains of the Truckee Meadows to speculate in the purchase of town site lots.
The new town was surveyed on the north side of the Truckee River in what is now downtown Reno. In the spring of 1868 the surrounding area contained only a few structures, including Myron C. Lake’s diminutive inn and toll bridge adjacent to the present site of the Riverside Hotel. Elsewhere in the Truckee Meadows a few farms and ranches had been established earlier in the 1860s, but no town existed…