Ely: Copper Spike in the Nevada Desert

Ely spent its first decades as a sleepy camp named for someone whose identity historians still debate. The real transformation came in nineteen oh two, when investor Mark Requa arrived, saw the copper potential in the nearby hills at Ruth, and began assembling the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company. To connect the mines to the Southern Pacific main line, he built the Nevada Northern Railway, a hundred and forty miles of track whose final copper spike was driven on Railroad Day, September twenty-ninth, nineteen oh six.

Within a few years Ely had become a full boom town, its prosperity literally cast in local metal. The Nevada Northern Railway Museum preserves the original roundhouse and locomotives today, and the copper pit at nearby Ruth is still one of the largest open-pit mines in Nevada.