The First Car in Carson City: A 1902 Locomobile Makes History

The first automobile ever seen in Carson City arrived on April 10, 1902, and it did what every car in this town has done since: it needed a garage. The car was a steam-powered Locomobile, and it came down the old road from Virginia City, the same Geiger Grade climb car people still love today. Journalist Alfred Doten, whose diaries are a window into early Nevada life, recorded that the machine "created quite a sensation," the first automobile the capital had ever seen.

A Steam Car and a Flat Tire

Doten's entry reads like the start of every car story ever told. The Locomobile, in the charge of an O. J. Smith, had crossed into Nevada from California, and the rough Comstock roads had been too much for at least one part of it. The car punctured a tire and had to be laid up in front of Raycraft's stable for repairs. The livery stable that had boarded horses for decades had just become the capital's first automotive service bay, the town's original garage.

The Very Beginning of Nevada's Automotive Age

The Locomobile arrived at the start of a revolution. Less than a year earlier, on May 20, 1901, Alexander Winton had driven a 12-horsepower Winton over Donner Summit, the first automobile to cross the Sierra Nevada, and stopped in Reno long enough to breakfast at the Riverside Hotel before pushing east. He was trying to become the first person to drive coast to coast, but Nevada's desert ended the attempt when the car bogged down in a sand drift roughly 530 miles from San Francisco. Winton gave up, and drivers for years afterward planned their crossings around that high-desert failure.

By the summer of 1903, the region had a front-row seat to history. Horatio Nelson Jackson drove a Winton touring car named the Vermont from San Francisco to New York, the first completed coast-to-coast drive, and he deliberately steered north of Nevada's deserts after Winton's 1901 breakdown. Packard's one-cylinder Old Pacific, driven by engineer Tom Fetch, followed the rail line east through the state instead and was photographed in Carson City, a rolling tribute to the wagon routes that had brought the Locomobile to town the year before.

What Those Days Tell Us Today

What those first drivers found in Northern Nevada still holds. The wagon roads that carried ore to Virginia City became some of the state's first automobile routes; the same pavement now hosts the Virginia City Hillclimb, club cruises, and the cruise nights that fill Carson City's downtown every summer. And the high desert that swallowed Winton's car is the same dry, salt-free climate that keeps collector cars from rusting here today.

The flat tire outside Raycraft's stable is also a reminder that the garage has always sat at the center of Northern Nevada car life. Livery stables became repair bays, repair bays became garages, and a home with a real shop still decides how much a person enjoys living here. If that sounds right to you, browse homes in Carson City to see what is on the market, or start with homes with 3+ car garages if you need room for the whole stable.

Nevada's first car needed a repair bay in the capital. More than a century later, Northern Nevada is still one of the best places in the West to park something special, and the garage remains the heart of the whole scene.