Virginia City is the best-preserved silver boomtown in North America and a National Historic Landmark. The Comstock Lode — a vast silver deposit discovered in 1859 on this hillside east of Carson City — produced over $700 million in ore and briefly made Nevada one of the richest places on earth. The mines financed a significant portion of the Union side in the Civil War, and at its peak Virginia City was a serious metropolis: theatres, newspapers, stock exchanges, and more millionaires per block than San Francisco. Mark Twain worked here in the early 1860s for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper, and it was in Virginia City that he first signed his work "Mark Twain."
C Street is the historic main drag, lined with Victorian commercial buildings, wooden boardwalks, and an implausible number of saloons — all original fabric, preserved partly by design and partly because the silver crash left no money for demolition. Piper's Opera House on B Street is one of the finest surviving frontier theatres in the West, still hosting performances. The Fourth Ward School Museum, a four-storey Victorian schoolhouse built in 1876, documents both local history and the story of the Comstock Lode.
For the full experience, go underground. Comstock mine tours take visitors into the actual tunnels beneath the town, where the silver came from. The Silver Terrace Cemeteries on the south side of town are among the most historically rich and visually striking in Nevada — divided into separate plots for Catholics, Masons, Chinese immigrants, and others, each reflecting the precise social hierarchies of a 19th-century boomtown.
Today the town has only a few hundred residents, and it is commercially oriented — there is plenty of tourist kitsch alongside the genuine history. Come on a weekday out of peak summer for a more contemplative experience.