Ruth D. Achard and Margaret D. McDonald: A Contribution to a Survey of Life in Carson Valley from First Settlement through the 1950s

Interviewees: Ruth D. Achard and Margaret D. McDonald
Interviewed: 1984
Published: 1984
Interviewer: R. T. King
UNOHP Catalog #107

Las Vegas has developed a reputation for imploding its past. Actually, the reputation is neither deserved nor unique. Other cities have blown up historic buildings whose owners or the community had decided had outlived their usefulness—Reno’s Mapes Hotel serving as an example. And Las Vegas has imploded mainly hotel-casinos in financial trouble or unlikely to compete with newer, more modern, larger resorts. What Las Vegas has done differently, though, is turn these implosions into spectacles.

The town of Gerlach sits about 100 miles northeast of Reno. More than a two-hour drive from any semblance of a city, the town has become known as an outpost for the Burning Man Festival, as well as the kind of place where residents can count on their neighbors for food and comfort.

The town, along with Empire, had a total of 499 residents in the 2000 census.

Gerlach was founded in 1906, when construction began on the Feather River Route of the Western Pacific Railroad. The route connected Oakland, California, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

Though not well known among Nevadans of European descent during his lifetime, and largely forgotten by historians until the 1970s, Thomas Detter was a prominent member of western African-American society. He wrote numerous letters to California's African-American newspapers, and he was asked to give speeches in a variety of locales. Most of the residents of Elko and Eureka, Nevada, though, would know him as a prominent African-American businessman—a barber and proprietor of barber shops and "bathing establishments.