The Virginia City Cemetery

The Silver Terrace Cemeteries are a series of terraces dramatically located on a steep, windswept hillside of Virginia City. As this boomtown became... more

by Janis Knight

Title

The Virginia City Cemetery

Artist

Janis Knight

Medium

Photograph - Color Digital

Description

The Silver Terrace Cemeteries are a series of terraces dramatically located on a steep, windswept hillside of Virginia City. As this boomtown became a more permanent settlement, there was a need for a cemetery. Beginning in the 1860s, a wide variety of fraternal, civic and religious groups established burial yards on the hillside.

From the Comstock Cemetery Foundation: The birth of the Comstock began in the year 1859 with discovery of gold by Pat McLaughlin and Peter O'Reilly. Henry (Pancake) Comstock, a fellow miner, believed that McLaughlin and O'Reilly's claim was on his property and was able to squeeze his way into the action and into history books when the giant ore strike was named after him - the Comstock Lode. During the early exploration mining, the miners encountered a blue-gray mud that stuck to their shovels and picks making digging difficult. This blue-gray mud turned out to be silver, called galena, and worth around $2000 per ton in 1859.

Rapidly, prospectors arrived from California and literally from all over the world. The Comstock area developed quickly into a large "international" mining camp and eventually formed four cities; Virginia City, Gold Hill, Silver City, and Dayton. The mining activity caught the attention of President Abraham Lincoln, who needed the precious metals and the potential of another republican vote to support the Civil War. President Lincoln made Nevada a state on October 31, 1864 even though the territory didn't have a high enough population to justify statehood. The states' logo is "Battle Born."

During the next twenty years, the Comstock grew to a population of approximately 30,000 people, concentrated largely in Virginia City and Gold Hill. The Comstock became the United States' first truly industrialized city with major innovations made in mining and milling that were unmatched at the time. The mines and mills ran twenty-four hours a day. It was an extremely busy, loud, and smelly collection of cities both above and below the ground. During the boom, Virginia City became the most important settlement between Denver and San Francisco. The Comstock Lode funded the buildings of San Francisco, the development of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, and made millionaires out of numerous everyday miners such as John Mackay, an Irish immigrant.

The mining peaked around 1879 and then began its decline, ending around 1887. During the nearly three decades of heavy activity, the Comstock Lode yielded over $400 million dollars in gold and silver with the richest deposit of silver in the world. In 1962 the National Park Service established the Virginia City National Historic Landmark District - one of the largest Districts in the United States.

I took this photo of the Virginia City Cemetery was taken in 2002 with black and white film, developed and printed the photo in the darkroom at the university.

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October 24th, 2014