 From the Pony Express to the Loneliest Road, the
museum will take you on a journey back in time. You begin your trip by revisiting
the lifeways of local Native Americans who inhabited the marshes and river channels so
long ago. Everyday tools are now works of art and the Native American way of life is
vividly depicted through the museum collections and Hidden Cave tours.Churchill County
was the center of many events of national importance. Beginning in the late 1840s,
thousands of exhausted emigrants on their way to California crossed the dreaded Forty Mile
Desert which ended at Ragtown, a few miles west of Fallon.
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The desert wind often teases the imagination with the echo
of horses hooves, reviving the ghosts of riders carrying mail across the country for the
famed Pony Express. Today, riders cross the country each year, revisiting the remains of
Churchill County's Pony Express stations as they retrace the route from St. Joseph,
Missouri to Sacramento, California. |
The Overland Telegraph followed the "Pony" and
remains of the line became the Churchill County Telephone & Telegraph System, the
nation's only county-owned and maintained telephone system.
The Reclamation Act of 1902, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, created the
Lahontan Valley we know today. Beginning with the completion of Derby Diversion Dam on the
Truckee River, a 31.5 mile canal to the Carson River and Lahontan Dam, the Newlands
Project became the focus of homesteading and farming in Nevada.
| The city of Fallon began as a dusty crossroads on Mike Fallon's ranch. In
1896 a post office was established, and by 1903 Fallon had captured the County Seat from
Buckland's Station, La Plata and the town of Stillwater. The wooden-frame courthouse,
built that same year, is still in use today, and is listed on the National Register of
Historic Places. |
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