Tuscarora: Silver, Chinatown, and Ceramics

About sixty miles north of Elko, up a long road into the Independence Mountains, the town of Tuscarora clings to a hillside above a dry valley. Silver was discovered here in eighteen seventy-one, and within a decade Tuscarora had grown into one of the more substantial mining camps in Nevada, with a population at its peak of about fifteen hundred people. Among them was one of the larger Chinese communities in the state. Chinese laborers, many recently discharged from the completed transcontinental railroad, arrived in Tuscarora beginning in eighteen sixty-nine and established a Chinatown that was, by some accounts, among the largest in Nevada outside the major railroad towns. The Chinese workers primarily ran placer mining operations at the original gold discovery site while the main silver camp developed nearby.

The silver played out by the mid-eighteen eighties and most of the population left. A second, smaller gold rush in the early nineteen hundreds briefly revived the town, and then it emptied for good. Tuscarora today is a ghost town with a strange second life. In nineteen sixty-two, a ceramics instructor named Dennis Parks passed through on a cross-country road trip, drawn by what he heard about the remote community. In nineteen sixty-six, Parks and his wife Julie established the Tuscarora Pottery School there, which continues to operate, training artists in a working studio in a ghost town surrounded by the ruins of a silver camp and the largely unrecorded history of a Chinese mining community.