The River and the Railroad: An Archaeological History of Reno

By Mary Ringhoff and Edward Stoner

When the City of Reno decided at the beginning of this century to create a trench to lower the railroad tracks that ran through its center, archaeologists associated with the ReTRAC (Reno Transportation Rail Access Corridor) project had a unique opportunity to explore the evidence of thousands of years of human history locked beneath downtown’s busy streets. The River and the Railroad traces the people and events that shaped the city, incorporating archaeological findings to add a more tangible physical dimension to the known history. It offers fascinating insights into the lives of many different people from Reno’s past and helps to correct some common misperceptions about the history of the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9780874178524

Book preview

The River and the Railroad

WILBUR S. SHEPPERSON SERIES IN NEVADA HISTORY

The River and the Railroad

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RENO

Mary Ringhoff and Edward J. Stoner

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

WILBUR S. SHEPPERSON SERIES IN NEVADA HISTORY

Series Editor: Michael Green

This publication is made possible in part by a grant from Nevada Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

University of Nevada Press, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

Copyright © 2011 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Kathleen Szawiola

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ringhoff, Mary, 1974–

The river and the railroad : an archaeological history of Reno / Mary Ringhoff and Edward J. Stoner.

p. cm. — (Wilbur S. Shepperson series in Nevada history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87417-843-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Reno (Nev.)—Antiquities.   2. Archaeology and history—Nevada—Reno.   3. Excavations (Archaeology)—Nevada—Reno.   4. Material culture—Nevada—Reno.   5. Reno (Nev.)—Social life and customs.   6. Reno (Nev.)—History.   I. Stoner, Edward J. (Edward Joseph), 1955–   II. Title.   III. Title: Archaeological history of Reno.

F849.R4R56 2011

979.3'55—dc22                       2010033692

ISBN-13: 978-0-87417-852-4 (ebook)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. A Brief History of Reno

2. Occupants of the Daylight Site

3. Reno and the Railroad

4. City Infrastructure and Everyday Life

5. The Story in Broken Bottles

6. African American–Owned Businesses in the Lake-Evans Block

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

Reno’s Masonic Hall and other Commercial Row buildings, ca. 1906

Stratigraphic cross section from the Daylight site

Spooner phase hearth after excavation

Martis house pit with hearth and cache pit after excavation

Steamboat dart points from the Daylight site

Elko series dart points from the Daylight site

Early Kings Beach rock-lined hearth, excavation in progress

Rosegate series arrow points from the Daylight site

Intentionally broken ground stone from the Daylight site

Site overview showing locations of features

Railroad bed over original ground surface

Excavation of an ocher-covered mano

Daylight site excavation overview

Original Reno townsite, 1868

Main line railroad corridor through downtown Reno, ca. 1899

Central Pacific depot, 1868

The second Depot Hotel, 1886

Depot Hotel fountain, 1882

The 1889 Central Pacific Depot and Wells Fargo Express Co. building, ca. 1906

The 1925–26 Southern Pacific passenger depot

The 1889 passenger depot and Wells Fargo Express Co. building

North side of the 1889 depot

Underpinning of the depot during trench construction

The Virginia Street subway, ca. 1906

Overview of downtown Reno, 1920

View north down Center Street toward the freight sheds, ca. 1915

Cross section of the pedestrian subway

Masonic Hall sidewalk vault

Reno’s first cisterns

A segment of the English Mill ditch

Valve box and water line

Brick utility access structure

A partially collapsed segment of wood stave pipe

Frank Brothers bottle labels

Overview of the Frank Brothers site location

Frank Brothers advertisement, 1911

Sam Frank, Myron Frank, and Ben Frank, ca. 1910

The Frank Brothers building

Frank Brothers wagons and horses, ca. 1906

Layout of the bottling works, ca. 1930

Profile of the glass-filled pit

Broken bottle finish with nib

Harlem Club die, Keno ball, and earring

The Lake-Evans block

The Dixie Club building

The Harlem Club (Club Harlem), 1967

New China Club advertisement, 1959

The Soul Club in its last year of operation, 1977

The Harlem Club building’s basement and the Dixie Club building

Excavated basement of the Harlem Club building

Deep wall of the Harlem Club and Dixie Club buildings

Looking east toward Reno and the newly built railroad, 1868

Looking east toward Reno and the railroad main line, 1997

MAPS

Reno and the ReTRAC project area

Northwestern Nevada and Lake Lahontan, ca. 15,000 BP

The Truckee Meadows, showing important prehistoric and historic locations

Downtown streets and site locations

Streets and site locations

Routes of the English Mill and Sullivan-Kelly ditches, 1931

Location of the Frank Brothers site

Location of the Lake-Evans block

Preface

This book is about the sites unearthed during a large-scale archaeological study in downtown Reno. As part of the archaeological research team for the Reno Transportation Rail Access Corridor (ReTRAC) project, we had the opportunity not only to participate in the largest public works endeavor ever undertaken in Reno, but also to explore the evidence of thousands of years of human history locked beneath downtown’s busy streets. This book originated as a paper on just one of the sites we found, the remnants of a mid-twentieth-century African American–owned nightclub, which we presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in January 2006.

The University of Nevada Press approached us about expanding the paper into a book on the Harlem Club and its place within the larger context of race relations in Nevada. That was our intention when we began, but our conversations about Reno’s historically diverse population kept leading us back to additional sites we had researched during the ReTRAC project. Again and again we found ourselves making connections between people as varied as the brothers who ran the Prohibition era bottling works on the west side of town and the prehistoric inhabitants of a village next to the Truckee River. We quickly concluded that many more of the ReTRAC sites deserved further exploration, and luckily the press agreed with us.

The process of using these diverse sites to explore the history of Reno in all its breadth and depth has been a challenging one, incorporating many different sources of information. We cannot provide an encyclopedic history of the Biggest Little City, but thanks to the investigation of the sites lying right beneath our feet, we can tell parts of Reno’s story that have not yet been told. The sites, features, and artifacts discussed in this book reveal that the Reno area has been home to diverse, rich cultures for thousands of years.

Our primary goal is to present a few of the West’s lesser-known stories, grounded in the history of a place we find particularly compelling. This work builds on decades of research and study by others, and we thank them for their dedication to archaeology, history, and Nevada.

Many people contributed time and effort to this book and the complicated project from which it sprang, and it is impossible to thank them all enough. The City of Reno supported this research, and Mark Demuth of MADCON Consultation Services gave us the opportunity to work on ReTRAC. Thanks are due to our past and present colleagues from Western Cultural Resource Management, Inc. (WCRM), including Tom Lennon, Steve Mehls, Renee Kolvet, Lief Christian, and Bob Peterson. Much of our work was grounded in research done by Susan Stornetta, Tom Burke, Ron Reno, Vickie Clay, and C. Lynn Furnis in an earlier phase of the project. Don Hardesty and Eugene Hattori provided valuable guidance at several points along the way.

WCRM’S intrepid archaeological monitors and field crews spent endless hours in all kinds of weather excavating sites and watching heavy equipment. Thank you. The Native American monitors on the Daylight site, Steve Nighthawk and Jeanne O’Day, faced some of the same challenges. Special thanks go to Jen Sigler for assistance well above and beyond what was required, and to Karen Laramore for her kind help with graphics and general morale.

We are grateful for the guidance of our agency contacts, including Ted Bendure at the Federal Highway Administration and Hal Turner at the Nevada Department of Transportation. Without the always timely assistance of Rebecca Palmer and Alice Baldrica at the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office in reviewing our many discoveries, the ReTRAC project would have never been completed.

Our research was immeasurably enriched by the help of our collaborators Oteria Cole, Onie Cooper, Wayne Crawford, Harold Curran, Dolores Feemster, Lonnie Feemster, Edward Folsom, Jean Hubbard, David Love, Darla Potter, and Norma Washington. Many of them reviewed chapters for us and helped us correct errors and omissions. Neal Cobb and Darla Potter provided additional help on general Reno history, and Michael Coray was kind enough to review portions of the manuscript as well. Michael Maher, Phillip Earl, Lee Brumbaugh, and Eric Moody of the Nevada Historical Society were ever helpful.

Many tribal members participated in consultation, but special thanks are due to Ben Aleck of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, William Dancing Feather and Linda Shoshone of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, and Buck Sampson and Michon Ibn of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.

Matt Becker, Charlotte Dihoff, Sara Vélez Mallea, Kathleen Szawiola, and Joanne O’Hare at the University of Nevada Press guided us through the writing and revision process with endless patience. Thanks also to Melinda Conner for her copyediting skills, and to our anonymous peer reviewers for their help. Thanks are due to Robert Leavitt, Stephanie Livingston, D. Craig Young, Peter Wigand, Penny Rucks, Chuck Wheeler, Jaclyn Raley, and Bob Estes for all their work on the project.

And finally, thanks to the family and friends who supported us during the writing process, especially Eve and Steve Ringhoff, John Ringhoff, and Cheryl Stoner.

Introduction

The town that would become Reno sprang up between the Truckee River and the Central Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental line in 1868. The main line railroad corridor has bisected the city ever since, sitting unchanged as Reno grew and evolved around it and posing obvious problems for traffic, public safety, and aesthetics. Over the years, city officials and residents proposed many solutions, including elevating the tracks, depressing them, and rerouting them, but the sheer magnitude of the undertaking made both residents and city government reluctant to act. The 1996 merger of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads precipitated a proposal by the city of Reno, Union Pacific, and the federal government to eliminate the existing railroad crossings in the central part of the city. After several years of political struggle, the proposal culminated in the Reno Transportation Rail Access Corridor (ReTRAC) project.

This undertaking, spanning 2001–05, involved the excavation of a large, partially covered trench in order to lower the railroad tracks through town over a length of more than two miles and a width of fifty-four feet. At its deepest point, the rail trench is thirty feet below the modern ground surface. Trains continue to run through Reno now, just underneath the day-to-day activities of the city.

The ReTRAC project was publicly funded and permitted, triggering mandatory protection of cultural resources.¹ Excavation and construction could not proceed without provisions for discovering, recording, and evaluating the significance of archaeological sites and their eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Aboveground sites such as historical buildings also had to be recorded and protected. Through a subcontractor, the city of Reno hired Western Cultural Resource Management, Inc. (WCRM) to conduct archaeological and historical research for the ReTRAC project. This book reports some of the results of that research.

The ReTRAC project provided a rare opportunity to examine archaeological resources across a large area. Excavating the trench for the railroad tracks took a slice out of the center of town, in essence creating a cross-section of the oldest part of Reno. Related work including relocation of utilities, construction of grade crossings, and excavation of drainage channels took place outside the trench, further expanding the area exposed to archaeological examination. The preparation of a temporary shoofly track running along the entire south side of the proposed trench to enable transcontinental rail traffic to continue during trench construction exposed additional archaeological sites.

During the five years of the ReTRAC project, WCRM recorded eighty-three archaeological sites and one previously unrecorded basement room of a historic building: the 1873 Masonic Hall building at the corner of Sierra Street and Commercial Row. Two of the sites were prehistoric in age (predating written records) and eighty-one were historical. With the exception of the prehistoric Daylight site, most of the archaeological sites discovered during the course of the ReTRAC project had been damaged by previous modern activity; as a result, few had substantial or stratified artifact deposits. There were no privies, capped dumps, or other sites conducive to contextualized material preservation. We excavated in eight of the sites and conducted research with the help of Native American groups, local archival repositories, and local residents willing to share their knowledge and memories. The result was a great deal of new information about many different people of the past, starting as early as five thousand years ago and extending up into the late twentieth century.

As one of very few large-scale archaeological projects that have taken place in an urban setting in the western United States, the ReTRAC project was a rare opportunity to add to our understanding of Reno’s prehistoric, historical, and modern inhabitants. The study also provided the chance to construct snapshots in time, exploring a shared heritage that transcends region, time period, culture, and topic. As Reno looks to its future, the stories uncovered during the course of our research can provide vital links to the city’s past, engaging its diverse public in a continuing conversation about how this place was, is, and can be.

There are many ways to combine archaeological and historical information and use it to pursue specific research topics. Some approaches lean toward objective scientific inquiry, while others are more subjective and humanistic. This book employs a broad approach, sometimes referred to as the archaeology of place, that is particularly conducive to combining data from archaeological and historical sources. Because it was restricted by the physical boundaries of the ReTRAC project, the archaeological research necessarily focused on the sites found within those boundaries. Most of the sites were downtown, and all were in or near the railroad corridor.

Our exploration of Reno’s past is strongly rooted in the place itself—not just in the artifacts found, the date ranges derived from geochemical analyses, or any overarching archaeological theories. The landscape provides the backdrop against which to examine the countless individual activities that, woven together, make up a place.

The following chapters trace the growth of Reno in a roughly chronological manner from the earliest known occupations into the late twentieth century. Chapter 1 opens with a brief overview of Reno’s development that provides background information on the prehistory and history of the area. Chapter 2 describes the Daylight site, a prehistoric village next to the Truckee River containing the stratified remnants of more than five thousand years of habitation. Research into this location has enabled an exploration of how people used the river’s rich resources and adapted to ever-changing environments. Chapter 3 examines the role of railroad companies in the development of Reno’s urban landscape and traces the evolution of that landscape into the present. Chapter 4 explores the laborious growth of Reno’s infrastructure system as residents dealt with urban ditches, catastrophic fires, and Reno chowder. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on two historical twentieth-century sites. Chapter 5 presents the history and archaeology of the Frank Brothers Bottling Works, a small business confronted first with national Prohibition and then with the Great Depression. Chapter 6 addresses the history and archaeology of several African American–owned clubs downtown, revealing tenacious responses to racial discrimination and segregation. The last chapter offers a few conclusions.

This book delves into just a few of the stories that have melded to make Reno the place that it is today. It presents Reno as a human landscape—one in which, as archaeologist Julian Thomas said, personal biographies are built up from located acts.² The history of Reno includes habitual activities and unremarkable, day-to-day events as well as the larger triumphs and catastrophes usually preserved in writing and memory. Archaeology is a particularly useful way to learn the details about how people lived in the past. Such minutiae are not always dramatic, but they are more representative of reality than the more spectacular moments are. Reno’s history contains many entertaining, often apocryphal legends. The city’s story is sometimes poetic and lovely, but is just as often messy, complicated, and ugly. If we remember only the mythical tales about the Biggest Little City and forget the real lives—those often mundane, sometimes wonderful, occasionally terrible tales of the everyday—we do both the place and ourselves a disservice. Reno’s truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes.

CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of Reno

The first people to arrive in what would become Reno were not the fur trappers, surveyors, or emigrants of the 1840s, but hunter-gatherers who explored the valley thousands of years before that. At the western edge of the Great Basin, the river-fed, grassy valley that would later become known as the Truckee Meadows played host to migrating waterfowl, abundant animal life, and, probably, prehistoric people. Although no evidence for these early inhabitants has yet been discovered, the presence of Clovis points in Washoe Valley, about twenty miles to the south, indicates that people were probably in the Truckee Meadows by about 12,000 years ago.

Archaeologists divide prehistory into periods in order to compare prehistoric cultures from different eras. Interpretation and understanding of the cultural variability within the western Great Basin and Sierra Nevada is likewise informed by partitioning broad aspects of that variability into prehistoric components, or phases. Archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips defined phase as an archaeological unit possessing traits sufficiently characteristic to distinguish it from all other units similarly conceived, whether of the same or other cultures or civilizations, spatially limited to the order of magnitude of a locality or region and chronologically limited to a relatively brief interval of time.¹

The time periods that units encompass are somewhat arbitrary and are constantly being revised as new information is discovered. They are also regionally dependent; the chronology for the Eastern Sierra Front, the area in which Reno is located, is different from chronologies in other parts of the Great Basin.

Archaeologists divide prehistory not only by phase, but also by adaptive strategy—what people did in a certain time period to adapt to changing environmental conditions. For the western Great Basin and the Eastern Sierra Front, these adaptive strategies fall into four periods: the Paleoarchaic, the Early Archaic, the Middle Archaic, and the Late Archaic.

The date ranges below are based on calibrated radiocarbon years and are expressed as years before present (BP) or years ago for the sake of editorial simplicity.