Reno: Divorce Capital, Gambling Mecca, Biggest Little City
Near Reno, Nevada
Reno came into existence on a single afternoon. On May ninth, eighteen sixty-eight, the Central Pacific Railroad held a land auction at a new townsite on the Truckee River, and within hours a permanent settlement was platted, named, and beginning to fill. Construction superintendent Charles Crocker named it after Major General Jesse Lee Reno, a Virginian who had fought for the Union and died at the Battle of South Mountain in eighteen sixty-two.
For its first few decades Reno was a respectable railroad and agricultural town. Then, in nineteen oh six, the wife of United States Steel Corporation president William Corey arrived to obtain a scandalous and highly publicized divorce. She took advantage of Nevada's comparatively liberal divorce statutes and its shorter residency requirements. The story ran in newspapers nationwide. What followed was a gold rush of a different kind.
For the next several decades, wealthy Americans who wanted out of their marriages made the trek to Reno. The city called itself the Divorce Capital of America, and it earned the title, during the nineteen thirties alone, more than thirty thousand people came here seeking legal separations. Hotels offered what were known as dude ranches where clients could establish residency while waiting out the required period.
In nineteen thirty-one, Nevada doubled down. The state legislature lowered the residency requirement for divorce to just six weeks, and in the same session, legalized casino gambling. The combination was deliberate and effective. Visitors could arrive, establish residency, gamble legally, and leave with a new status on their marriage certificate. No other state offered the package.
Las Vegas eclipsed Reno by the nineteen fifties, and no-fault divorce laws spreading across other states in the nineteen seventies drained the divorce trade. But Reno's downtown arch still reads The Biggest Little City in the World, a slogan selected in a newspaper contest in the nineteen twenties, when the city first understood that its outsized reputation was its most valuable asset.
