Pritchard's Station

Nevada and the rest of the West were generally crisscrossed by stagecoach lines during the latter 19th century and even into the early 20th. It was a dusty, difficult, time-consuming, and an uncomfortable way to travel—but if there was no railroad, there were few alternatives.

Many of these old lines were ephemeral, with little trace left today. Other routes are now followed by modern highways. In a surprising number of cases, however, the line persisted for a decade or more, but the route is still about as remote as it was back when the stages were thundering. Sometimes the original destinations became ghost towns. Sometimes the modern highway takes a route that was impractical in the old days, through being too steep for horse-drawn vehicles, or simply being too expensive for the resources at the time, as by requiring prohibitive amounts of excavation, or bridges that were beyond the state of engineering.

Pritchard's station lies on one of these abandoned routes. It was on the Belmont-Tybo-Eureka stage line from the 1870s into the 1880s. It even had a post office briefly in 1874. The ruin consists of a sturdy building with stone block walls on the outside, the remnants of a wooden roof, and some dilapidated interior wooden walls. Although a few foundations, probably from stables and pens, also occur just north of the station, it now appears as an incongruous lone building out in the desert.