Jacobsville, Nevada

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jacobsville is a ghost town in Lander County, Nevada. It sits about six miles west of Austin, on the east bank of the Reese River near US 50. It has also been called Jacobs Spring, Jacobs Station, Reese River Station, and Reese River.

The town was named after George Washington Jacob, an agent for the Overland Mail Company. It sits at an elevation of 5,699 feet (1,737 meters).

History in brief:
- The area likely began as a mail station around 1859 on George Chorpenning’s mail routes near the Reese River.
- The station was burned by Native Americans in 1860. A partially finished adobe building was still noted on October 13, 1860, when explorer Richard Francis Burton visited.
- Reese River Station served as a Pony Express station from April 3, 1860, to October 1861.
- Ruins of the adobe Pony Express station were still visible northwest of Jacobsville in the early 1980s.
- In 1861, Mark Twain passed through the area and mentioned telegraph workers at Reese River station in Roughing It.
- On May 2, 1862, a former Pony Express rider, William M. Talcott, found rich silver ore in Pony Canyon while cutting wood for Jacobs Station. This sparked the Reese River silver rush.
- Jacobsville was the provisional county seat of Lander County from December 1862 to September 1863. A courthouse was built in 1863 and moved to Austin in September.
- Myron Angel noted that in 1863 Jacobsville had 300–400 residents, with two hotels, three stores, a post office, a telegraph office, a courthouse, and about 50 houses.
- The Jacobsville post office operated from March 1863 to April 1864.
- By the late 1870s or early 1880s, only a single farmhouse remained at the site.