Eureka: Nevada's Lead-Silver Boomtown

In September of eighteen sixty-four, a five-man party from Austin found silver-lead ore in the hills here, the first major silver-lead discovery in America. For years the ore sat largely untapped because nobody could figure out how to profitably smelt the complex lead-silver mix.

The breakthrough came in eighteen sixty-nine, when General W.W. McCoy built a new type of smelter that cracked the problem. Sixteen smelters eventually operated just outside town. By the eighteen seventies, Eureka held nine thousand people and was the second-largest city in Nevada, with fifty active mines producing sixty-four million dollars in silver and gold, plus over two hundred twenty-five thousand tons of lead.

The silver crash of the eighteen eighties ended the boom. The last smelters closed in eighteen ninety. Today Eureka survives as a quiet county seat of a few hundred people along US Fifty, with a remarkable Victorian-era courthouse still in use.