Rediscovering Eureka

Bless his hyperbolic soul, boomtown booster Lambert Molinelli couldn't resist making Eureka sound like the second coming of San Francisco -- or at least the next Virginia City.

Following the 1864 discovery of lead-silver and gold deposits in the Diamond Mountains, for a time it seemed all roads might one day lead to Eureka. It appeared on its way to rivaling Virginia City as Nevada's pre-eminent boom town. When the Eureka and Palisade narrow-gauge railroad was completed in 1875, Eureka was connected to the great Central Pacific Railroad and the outside world. Its 16 smelters earned it the nickname "the Pittsburgh of the West," but by the time Molinelli published his promotional guidebook, Eureka's mines were approaching the pinnacle of their nineteenth century productivity.

More than 100 years later, with its population of nearly 600, Eureka is the great Nevada boomtown that time forgot.

While Virginia City mines tourists by the score, Eureka's atmosphere is decidedly less gaudy. Tour buses have yet to crowd its streets. Its location is one reason it has gone undiscovered by the masses. Eureka sits like a jewel at 6,481 feet beneath Prospect Mountain in the Diamond range 312 miles north of Las Vegas. With one boot in the past and another in the present, this little town is jammed with 47 buildings and points of historical interest. ...

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