Lander County

Lander County was one of the original nine counties created in 1861. Named for Frederick W. Lander; chief engineer of a federal wagon route through the area in 1857. He later served as Special Indian Agent in the area, and died during the Civil War in Virginia in 1862 at the rank of brigadier general. Created in 1862, Lander County sprang forth as the result of a mining boom on the Reese River, along the old pony express line; taking a considerable portion of Churchill and Humboldt counties with it. Eventually, Lander would be known as the "mother of counties" because so many were carved out of it. Its first county seat was Jacobsville in 1862 which was soon after moved to Austin in 1863 and finally Battle Mountain in 1979.

Battle Mountain is located approximately 225 miles northeast of Reno and is the county seat for Lander County. Lander County is named after General Fredrick W. Lander who was a prominent road builder for the Department of the Interior. He played an important role in negotiating a peace settlement with American Indians during the Pyramid Lake War of 1860. The Lander County region attracted prospectors fanning out across the Great Basin after the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode. In October 1868, the railroad established Reese River Siding and made Argenta its principal station and point of departure for the busy mining camps to the south. In January 1870, Argenta was moved five miles west, Reese River Siding was renamed Battle Mountain Switch, and the town of Battle Mountain sprang into existence. Nevada's most prominent mining camps in the 1870s were served by the railroad at Battle Mountain.

From 1880 to 1938, Battle Mountain was the operating headquarters for the Nevada Central Railroad, as well as the Battle Mountain and Lewis Railroad (1881-1890). The town's first copper boom developed in 1897 in the Galena (Battle Mountain) Range. By the middle 1930s, most of the mines that generated traffic at Battle Mountain were shut down and boarded up. Some 30 years later, the DuVal Company (now known as the Battle Mountain Gold Company) invested more than $20 million in the development of large copper ore bodies in the hills to the south. Battle Mountain became a boomtown, the schools overflowed, the sewer system burst its seams and the municipal wells started pumping sand.

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