History & Heritage

Reno's history is stranger and better documented than most visitors expect: a silver rush that funded San Francisco, half a century as America's divorce capital, and a downtown that still carries the architecture of both.

Virginia City, half an hour south-east and 2,000 feet up, is where the Comstock Lode came out of the ground in the 1860s. It is a preserved mining town rather than a reconstruction, and it is the single best half-day trip from Reno for anyone who likes history.

In Reno itself, the divorce era left a physical mark — the courthouse, the riverbank, the residency hotels. For roughly forty years, ending in the 1960s, Reno's six-week residency requirement made it the place Americans came to end a marriage. It built the hospitality industry that the casinos later inherited.

Walking tours are the honest way to see this. The buildings are close together and the stories are specific to particular addresses, which does not survive being read in a car.