Virginia City historian Joe Curtis came to the Churchill County Museum prepared to bust a few bubbles.
Closing out the museum’s four-week “Layers of Nevada” Fall Lecture Series, Curtis used historic photographs, maps, and a lifetime of research to examine some of the stories that have become nearly as famous as Virginia City itself.
Curtis has been collecting and researching photographs and historical information about Virginia City and the Comstock since he was a boy. The museum’s education curator introduced him as the final speaker in the series, noting that his collection includes original documents, newspapers, and photographs.
Curtis also brought a personal connection to Fallon. He told the audience he spent part of third grade at Oats Park School, while his mother and her siblings grew up in Fallon. His mother’s maiden name was Buckner.
“It’s always been kind of special to me,” Curtis said of Fallon.
From there, Curtis turned his attention to Virginia City and a history that, in his telling, is often considerably different from the version tourists encounter.
Using historic photographs, he showed the audience the densely developed communities of Virginia City and Gold Hill, their mines, businesses, hotels, schools, churches, railroads, and mills. The photographs also illustrated how much of the historic landscape has disappeared through fires, snow damage, deterioration, and demolition.
Curtis challenged a commonly repeated claim that as many as 50,000 people once lived in Virginia City. He told the audience the peak population was closer to 22,000 to 23,000 when Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Silver City are considered together.
He also took aim at the image of Virginia City as a cowboy town.
“Cowboys were not in Virginia City,” Curtis said, explaining that the community was fundamentally a mining town and that cowboys generally came in from surrounding valleys.
Ghost stories received similar treatment.
Curtis told the audience that some of Virginia City’s enduring supernatural tales were deliberately created as tourism increased following the 1959 debut of the television series “Bonanza.”
He said several local women, including his mother, devised ghost stories intended to help attract visitors to town.
According to Curtis, some of those tales created for tourists decades ago continue to be repeated as history.
Curtis demonstrated just how easily a good story can begin to sound like fact with a tale about oysters in Virginia City.
He explained that oysters shipped from San Francisco were popular on the Comstock, but some supposedly arrived too salty or were difficult to open. Curtis said miners gathered the unwanted oysters and took them deep into the mines, where they placed them in pools of fresh water for months. There, according to the story, the oysters continued to grow while losing their salty flavor before being brought back to the surface and sold to restaurants.
For a moment, this reporter nearly bought it, wondering how oysters that were essentially dead could possibly begin growing again.
Then Curtis asked the audience whether they believed him.
“I hope not,” he said.
The entire story was a hoax.
Curtis said such storytelling was hardly new to Nevada. Newspapers and residents were producing hoaxes and tall tales during the 19th century, sometimes simply to see how many people they could convince.
He pointed to the Sazerac Lying Club in Austin, where participants competed to invent believable stories. Curtis said that tradition is now being revived with Virginia City Lodge No. 2 of the Sazerac Lying Club.
Curtis said the group plans a lying competition March 27, 2027, in Virginia City. He joked that he has been told he cannot compete and will instead serve as a judge. He also told the audience that Rep. Mark Amodei is expected to be the guest speaker.
The evening eventually moved from lecture to conversation, with audience members asking Curtis about mining, historic buildings, stamp mills, and the origins of some of Virginia City’s best-known stories.
One question concerned the tale that Virginia City received its name after James Finney, known as “Old Virginny,” broke a bottle of whiskey and christened the place. Curtis said the story has been repeated for generations but lacks the documentation necessary to establish that it happened exactly as the legend describes.
“There’s no hardcore provenance to prove that that’s exactly what happened,” Curtis said.
Curtis ended his visit with something specifically for Fallon.
He brought a copy of an 1863 Nevada map from his collection to give to the museum. Curtis said he had looked through his collection for something connected to Fallon and selected the map because it included Churchill County.
The gift provided an appropriate ending not only to Curtis’ presentation but to a four-week lecture series built around uncovering different layers of Nevada history.
After an evening of separating stories from history, Curtis left his Fallon audience with plenty of both.
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