The gold-rush-era town of Virginia City, recently purchased by the State of Montana to preserve for posterity, makes a fitting first subject for the Montana Mainstreet series. Once it was Montana's acting territorial capital and the center of trade for Alder Gulch, the site of the richest placer mines in the world, but Virginia City became a town almost frozen in time once gold deposits played out and the state capital moved to Helena in 1889. Today, Virginia City attracts visitors from all over the world, who marvel at its intact architecture. If walking down Virginia City's streets is like a trip backwards in time, the road map for that journey is Guide to Historic Virginia City.

Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West. Drawing on the work of hundreds of volunteers, students, and professional archaeologists, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past shows how every detail—from unearthed artifacts to reports of local saloons to plans for the cemetery to surviving nineteenth-century buildings—adds to our view of Virginia City when it was one of the richest places on earth. James recreates this unlikely epitome of frontier industry and cosmopolitan living, the thriving hub of corporate executives, middle-class families, miners, prostitutes, and barkeepers—and more foreign-born residents per capita than anywhere else in the country—in a spot that had begun its life a few years earlier as the mining camp of several lucky guys. An excavation of the history of Virginia City, a window on the heyday of the American frontier, James’s book is also an enlightening look at how archaeology brings the story of the past to life.

Witness to History, by Virginia City Curator Emeritus John D. Ellingsen, is a delightful and often moving book, unusual among writings on the Gold Rush era of Montana and the West. It is part history, part memoir, and part passionate essay about the importance of historic preservation. The book details the origins of Virginia City and Nevada City their rough beginnings and their glory days. It also offers a unique perspective on the restoration and saving of Virginia and Nevada Cities by a man who has dedicated his entire life to that cause. More than two dozen historical photographs help to tell one of the most significant stories of historic preservation in the western United States.

Virginia City was a mining boomtown; it appeared virtually overnight as a result of the Comstock Lode silver strike of 1859, found because of the sticky mud washed from the shovels while mining for gold! During its heyday, Virginia City had more than 30,000 residents and was called the richest city in America. Virginia City is also the "birthplace" of Mark Twain, as it was here (in February 1863) that the young writer Samuel Clemens, who was then a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper, first used his famous pen name, Mark Twain. Virginia City, USA's largest National Historic Landmark, is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. President Lincoln needed gold and silver to keep the Union solvent during the Civil War, so on October 31, 1864, Lincoln made Nevada a state, even though it didn't have enough people to constitutionally authorize statehood. Take a trip to this famous city through the lens of John D. Weigand and through the verse of Penelope Dyan, who is an award winning author, attorney and former teacher. Dyan and Weigand see what kids see, and know how to grab their interest. Nothing is spoon fed here as Dyan's intent is to inspire questioning and learning, and this is what she does best, because to learn one begins with inspiration.

Guidebook to the historical sights in Virginia City, with color photographs, and map with key.

Nevada’s Comstock Mining District has been the focus of legend since it first burst into international prominence in the late 1850s, and its principal settlement, Virginia City, endures in the popular mind as the West’s quintessential mining camp. But the authentic history of the Comstock is far more complex and interesting than its colorful image. Contrary to legend, Virginia City spent only its first few years as a ramshackle mining camp. The mining boom quickly turned it into a thriving urban center, at its peak one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, replete with most of the amenities of any large city of its time. The lure of the area’s fabulous wealth attracted a remarkably heterogenous population from around the world and offered employment to dozens of trades and thousands of people, both men and women, representing every one of the region’s diverse ethnic groups. Ronald James’s brilliant account of the Comstock’s long and eventful history—the first comprehensive study of the subject in over a century—examines every aspect of the region and employs information gleaned from hundreds of written sources, interviews, archeological research, computer analysis, folklore, gender studies, physical geography, and architectural and art history, as well as over fifty rare photographs, many of them previously unpublished.