Virginia City, Nevada: Queen Of The Comstock

The historic city remains the crown jewel of the Silver State’s mining towns.

- Leo W. Banks

In its boom days in the early 1860s, Virginia City, Nevada, “royally roosted” midway up the steep slope of Mount Davidson, a boomtown visible from 50 miles away. We know that because the great Mark Twain said so in his 1872 memoir, Roughing It.

“It claimed a population of fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand,” wrote Twain, a reporter for the town’s Territorial Enterprise newspaper, “and all day long half of this little army swarmed the streets like bees and the other half swarmed among the drifts and tunnels of the ‘Comstock,’ hundreds of feet down in the earth directly under those same streets.”

Today, more than 1.5 million visitors a year come to town, and rest assured, it wasn’t built by Disney.

“You’d be surprised how many people ask that,” says Joe Curtis, Storey County’s director of emergency management, who also leads informal history tours. “They look around and can’t believe it’s real. But when you walk down C Street, most buildings you pass are originals dating to 1862.”