The growth of Nevada is uniquely tied to the tracks. Nevada’s early history is famous for its "flash-in-the-pan" mining booms, but it was the railroad that truly built the state's permanent, organized communities. Hawthorne is a perfect example. The town was born out of the desert in 1881 when H.M. Yerington, president of the Carson and Colorado Railroad, chose the site as a strategic division hub.

Rather than a slow, organic growth, Hawthorne was created overnight. The railroad owned all the land in the area and, seeking to build out communities along its tracks for corporate convenience, decided to put the parcels up for auction. On April 14, 1881, a train literally rolled into the valley packed with prospective buyers who had been wined, dined, and sold on the immense potential of the nearby mines and beautiful Walker Lake. Interestingly, while the town bore his name, local pioneer William A. Hawthorne didn't own any of the auctioned land. A prominent local lumberman, Hawthorne had staked a mining claim on Mt. Grant and established a ranch on Cat Creek in 1878. Hawthorne  was a well-liked friend of Yerington and worked as the railroad's road superintendent, so the company named the town "Hawthorne" as a respectful nod to him.

While many railroad towns eventually withered away when steam gave way to diesel, Hawthorne survived. What kept the community alive, active and thriving through the decades was the arrival of the military, cementing its modern identity around the Hawthorne Army Depot.

The story of Hawthorne is the rule, not the exception—railroad-engineered towns are the true backbone of Nevada's geography. While the general public associates early Nevada with romanticized "Wild West" mining boomtowns, those towns were notoriously unstable. A miner found silver, 10,000 people rushed in, the ore dried up, and everyone vanished, leaving behind ghost towns like Mina.



The railroads, however, brought corporate planning, math, and permanence. It was incredibly common for rail companies to build Nevada towns from scratch using the exact same strategy they used in Hawthorne.

The Carson & Colorado wined and dined buyers to build Hawthorne, and the mighty Union Pacific did the exact same thing to birth Las Vegas. Long before the casinos, Las Vegas was just a desert oasis chosen as a railroad water stop. On May 15, 1905, railroad officials held a massive land auction under a mesquite tree, selling off 1,200 lots to create the downtown grid.