Finding history in Virginia City

Even now, I can rattle off the names like days of the week: Wallace. Galveston. Princeton. Evansville. Gulf Shores. Chattanooga. Flagstaff. Sedona. Johnstown. Boulder. Coronado. Washington, D.C.

Between 2013 and this January, I visited each venue, a significant setting in one of my novels, before publishing that novel. I wanted to at least get a feel of the place — and even a time — before committing its particulars to print.

This week, I added Virginia City, an important setting in The Fair, to the list. Though the Nevada mining town of 900 is not what it was in the early 1870s, when more than twenty thousand people flocked to the Comstock Mining District to make their fortune in silver, it is nonetheless still impressive.

Some buildings mentioned in the novel still stand. They include the Storey County Courthouse, Piper's Opera House, First Presbyterian Church, Fourth Ward School, and the Territorial Enterprise, where Mark Twain worked as a reporter in the early 1860s. The Silver Terrace Cemeteries and the Mackay Mansion, which inspired other venues in the book, are also still around.

Other buildings, like the palatial International Hotel, are gone. The six-story, 160-room structure, once the most prominent hotel between Denver and San Francisco, burned to the ground in 1914.

Despite these and other changes and the passage of 127 years, I did not have difficulty imagining Virginia City as it existed in the spring and summer of 1893. The town exudes the late nineteenth century. It still embodies the spirit of an industrious time in American history.

For practical reasons, I did not visit Chicago, the primary setting in The Fair. Unlike Virginia City, Chicago today is much different than it was in 1893. The grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition are now a public park. The Midway Plaisance, site of the first Ferris Wheel, is an expansive lawn at the University of Chicago.

The Fair, the second book in the Time Box series, is in its final editing phase. I still intend to publish the novel in the first week of July.

Photographs: Territorial Enterprise building, Fourth Ward School, Piper's Opera House, First Presbyterian Church.