Hotel · Tonopah, Nevada · Built 1905 (Brougher-Govan Block); 1907–1908 (five-story hotel)
Mizpah Hotel
A five-story stone and brick hotel of 1907–08 on Tonopah's main corner, built by the silver camp's leading capitalists and joined to a three-story 1905 bank block; for two decades among the tallest buildings in Nevada.
History
Jim Butler's silver strike of May 1900 founded Tonopah and pulled Nevada out of two decades of decline. The Mizpah, named for the camp's first great mine, began as a saloon that the nomination calls the town's first permanent structure. In 1905 Cal Brougher and R. J. Govan put up a three-story stone block on Main Street, designed by the Reno architect Morrill J. Curtis, with a hotel entrance between a brokerage and the Tonopah Banking Corporation, whose vault survives. In March 1907, with capital from the Goldfield mining magnates George Wingfield and George S. Nixon, they began a five-story hotel on the corner to designs by George E. Holesworth, who was building the Goldfield Hotel at the same time. Slowed by the panic of 1907, it opened on November 17, 1908, at a cost of about $200,000, with steam heat and the town's first elevator. The older block's upper floors became hotel rooms.
The lobby became the meeting place of Nevada's mining and political elite; Tasker Oddie and Key Pittman were regulars, and companies were floated there in an afternoon. Wyatt Earp, who worked in Tonopah, is said to have tended bar, though he left before the hotel was built, and stories of a murdered 'Lady in Red' haunting the fifth floor belong to its legend. After decades of changing owners, Frank Scott of Las Vegas restored it from 1979. It closed in 1999, and in 2011 the winemakers Fred and Nancy Cline bought it, renovated it and reopened it that August.
“The Mizpah Hotel has been the center of social and economic activities since the boom days.”
Architecture
The hotel has a reinforced-concrete and steel frame below the third floor, with masonry bearing walls faced in locally quarried stone and brick. Rough-cut stone piers frame the ground-floor bays, the second story is scored plaster imitating smooth stone, and the upper three floors are tan brick under a large pressed-tin cornice; tin bands mark the lower floors. Fire escapes were designed as ornamental balconies with lacy iron railings, and the shallow balcony railings over the two street entrances have balusters shaped like a Union Jack. Inside, a wooden stair under a skylight joins the two buildings across their mismatched floor levels. The 1905 block has a coursed ashlar front, cast-iron columns and a stepped central pediment.
What to look for
- Rough-cut stone piers at street level
- Pressed-tin cornice imitating carved stone
- Ornamental fire-escape balconies
- Union Jack-pattern balusters over the entrances
- The 1905 Brougher-Govan Block next door
Setting
The Mizpah stands at Main and Brougher streets in Tonopah, the old silver camp on U.S. 95 midway between Reno and Las Vegas. The headframes of the Tonopah Historic Mining Park rise on the hill just behind downtown, and the Belvada Building, which shared the title of the state's tallest, is nearby.
Timeline
- 1900Jim Butler's strike founds Tonopah
- 1905Three-story Brougher-Govan Block built
- 1907Five-story hotel begun in March
- 1908Mizpah Hotel opens on November 17
- 1979Frank Scott begins restoration
- 1999Hotel closes
- 2011Reopened in August after renovation
Where sources differ
- The 1978 nomination credits Morrill J. Curtis with the whole hotel; a 1980 county survey attached to it attributes the 1908 building to George E. Holesworth and only the 1905 block to Curtis.
- The nomination dates the Mizpah saloon to 1901; Wikipedia gives 1907, which conflicts with the hotel's own history.
- Stories that Wyatt Earp kept bar, that Jack Dempsey was a bouncer and that Howard Hughes married here are legends contradicted by the record.
- The exact National Register listing date is not given in the sources.
