1950 Steamboat Pkwy, Reno, NV 89521

Damonte Ranch Park

Park Description:

Damonte Ranch Park is an 8-acre Reno park with year-round restrooms.

Park Amenities:

Playground, basketball court, walking paths, picnic shelter, barbeque area, and tables/benches.

Park Contact Information:

City of Reno - Parks & Facilities (775) 334-2417

Park Highlights

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Park History

Click the image to read each topic's full text!

History of Migrants in the Damonte Area

By the mid-1840’s, migrants began to arrive. The first non-natives to travel through the Truckee Meadows were the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy wagon party in 1844. A local Paiute, Chief Truckee, is credited with guiding these emigrants into the Sierra Nevada mountains to Truckee and Donner Lake; hence the origin of the name Truckee throughout the region. Next came John C. Fremont in 1845 and the Donner party in the fall/winter of 1846/1847. Many more migrants traveled through the area after gold was discovered in California.

While Mormons were the first few European settlers of the Truckee Meadows area in the mid-1850s, the first non-Mormon European settlers were brothers Peleg and Joshua Brown in January 1857. The brothers settled in what is now the Damonte Ranch area while it was still part of the Utah Territory. There were only a few other immigrants in the area at that point in time. The Brown ranches included cattle, oxen, bulls, horses, and gardens with many vegetables and fruits.

Image:
Photo of John C. Fremont.

Mining Changes Things in Damonte

Things changed in 1859 with the discovery of silver in close-by Virginia City. Many men came to mine the silver, along with merchants and bankers to supply the miners. Peleg Brown provided food and lodging to the miners; he replaced the sagebrush land with crops of alfalfa to feed the livestock used in mining.

Peleg donated $2,400 for the digging of an irrigation canal from the Truckee River in Verdi to Steamboat Creek near his home the valley. There were only 543 residents in what is now Washoe County in 1860, but that expanded to 1,613 in 1861 when Nevada became a territory.

Peleg Brown

In 1864, Peleg Brown built one of the earliest homes in the area at a cost of $4,000, which still stands today on Old Virginia Road near the Hwy 395 overpass and is on the National Register of Historic Places (see photo). Around this time his ranch totaled 620 acres. In the 1870s, Peleg built Brown’s Station on the Virginia and Truckee Railway behind his ranch house to provide goods and services to passengers and the mining business. The station was used until the 1950s when the V&T railroad was shut down.

In 1877, Peleg Brown donated an acre of land just down the street from his home for the construction of Brown School, one of the oldest schools in the area. The school was enlarged to today’s brick building which now houses the Washoe County School District offices (the latest Brown Elementary School is now located near Virginia Foothills Park and was built in 1989).

Image:
Photo from Library of Congress. Photographer: Fisher, Martin.

Louis Damonte

Peleg Brown died in 1878 at the age of 42. Eventually, the Brown ranch was sold by his descendants in 1940 to Louis Damonte. Louis Damonte came to the US from Italy in 1911. He bought land of his own plus the Brown Ranch. Eventually a portion of the Damonte Ranch was sold to Boeing Aircraft for the new airport, and some land was sold to Wilbur May for his Double Diamond ranch. Louis Damonte did much to improve the area, including improving the canals and ditches supplying water to the valley. His ranch eventually grew to be 7,000 acres. Damonte Ranch Owners (Bennie, Eva, and Louis) sold 520 acres of the ranch to the Silver State Park in 1971 for development of a sports arena complex, horse race track, grandstand, and stables. Those amenities never materialized.

As Reno grew, the need for more housing was evident. Starting in 1995, over 2,500 acres of the Damonte and Double Diamond ranches were transformed into the largest residential and commercial project in Reno’s history. Even today the demand for more housing in the Reno area is leading to more and more subdivisions filling up what used to be fields of alfalfa.

Image:
Photo from Library of Congress. Photographer: Fisher, Martin.

Steamboat Creek and Springs

From the park, visitors can walk along the trails following the Steamboat Creek. The creek originates a few miles south of the park at Steamboat Springs. These springs were discovered by a Frenchman, Felix Monet in 1960. The hot springs were used for many years for the treatment of rheumatism and many other conditions when Dr. James Ellis set up a hospital there in 1861.

Even Mark Twain used the hot springs to seek a remedy for his cough, and it is Twain who is rumored to have named the area because it reminded him of the clouds of steam puffing from a steamboat, when he said, “Behold! A Steamboat in the desert!” U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant visited the springs in 1879. A post office was located at Steamboat Springs in 1880. The creek coming from the springs is formed by many other springs which come down from the hills and empty into the creek.

Image:
Photo from Library of Congress. Photographer: O'Sullivan, Timothy H., 1840-1882.

Damonte Ranch Through Time

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Damonte Ranch Park on iNaturalist

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Want To Learn More?

References & Further Info:

City of Reno Parks & Facilities Directory - Damonte Ranch Park
A Steamboat in the Desert. (2010). Retrieved from Healthy Beginnings Magazine: https://www.hbmag.com/a-steamboat-in-the-desert/
Brown, H. (1968). A County Called Washoe.
Davis, S. P. (1913). History of Nevada, volume 2.
Hummel, N. (1888). General History and Resources of Washoe County, Nevada.
Moreno, R. (2015). A Short History of Reno, 2nd edition.
New Southeast Reno. (2008). Reno Gazette Journal .
Protect Mustangs. (2012). Retrieved from Historic Virginia City wild horses going to auction: http://protectmustangs.org/?p=2765
Roccapriore, C. (2007, September 17). Construction under way at site of Damonte neighborhood park. Reno Gazette Journal .
Spillman, B. (2018, January 30). Nevada could give away nearly 3,000 free-range horses in May. Reno Gazette Journal .
Steamboat Springs - Historical Marker #198. (2018). Nevada Historical Markers .
Steamboat Springs. (2018). Retrieved from Nevada State Preservation Office: http://shpo.nv.gov/nevadas-historical-markers/historical-markers/steamboat-springs
Voyage of the Continents: North America (2013). [Motion Picture].
Walton-Buchanan, H. (2015, Winter). The Peleg Brown / Louis Damonte Ranch. FootPrints by Historic Reno Preservation Society .

Contributor(s):

Jill Richardson (history)

Haley McGuire

Alex Shahbazi

Last Updated:

August 26, 2022 at 6:31:55 PM

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