Virginia City, Nevada: Old Virginia and the Broken Bottle

Virginia City, Nevada, is named for a miner called Old Virginia, and Henry Comstock said the man christened it by falling down and breaking his whiskey bottle. That story has only one real witness, but the nickname behind the name is well documented.

Who Old Virginia was

His name was James Fennimore, and he was a Virginian. Historian H. H. Bancroft, writing in 1890, says that when he first came to Carson Valley he went by James Finney, and only later admitted his real name. Bancroft wasn’t a fan. He calls Fennimore “an intemperate Virginian, without either brains or education,” who dug up a season’s wages each year and spent them on “bad whiskey.” With all those names to choose from, Bancroft says, “he was dubbed by the miners Old Virginia.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-names book for the U.S. Geological Survey keeps it simple: Virginia City was “named for an early prospector known as ‘Old Virginia.’”

The bottle

The famous version comes from Henry Comstock, the prospector whose name ended up on the Comstock Lode. William Wright, who wrote as Dan De Quille, put it in his 1877 History of the Big Bonanza:

“‘Old Virginia’ was out one night with a lot of the ‘boys’ on a drunk, when he fell down and broke his whisky bottle. On rising he said—‘I baptize this ground Virginia.’”

Wright also printed a letter from Comstock telling the same story, and Bancroft repeats it, calling the new name “a drunken whim of Fennimore’s.” That sounds like three sources, but it’s really one: everybody is quoting Comstock. And Comstock had his own angle. In the same letter he says, “Virginia City was first called Silver City. I named it.”

So you can take the bottle as the story the old-timers told. The part that’s solid is that the town carries Fennimore’s nickname.

Pleasant Hill, Ophir, Virginia Town

The camp went through names fast in 1859. Wright, going by the papers filed in the mining records, says they first called it “Pleasant Hill” and “Mount Pleasant Point.” In August it was “Ophir,” after the mine, and in September “Ophir Diggings.” In October it shows up as “Virginia Town.”

A month later somebody proposed to “change the name of the place from Virginia Town to Wun-u-muc-a, in honor of the chief of the Py-utes.” Bancroft says the idea was unpopular, and that same November, Wright says, the town was first called Virginia City. The chief’s name ended up on a different Nevada town, Winnemucca.

Gannett’s other answer

Here’s a wrinkle you might not expect. Gannett’s book also has an entry for “Virginia; cities in Cass County, Illinois, and Storey County, Nevada, named from the State.” So the same book gives two answers. They don’t really fight, since Fennimore was a Virginian, but the federal list has it both ways.

Fennimore didn’t get to enjoy the fame for long. Wright says he died at Dayton in July 1861 after a bucking mustang threw him while he’d been drinking.

The baby named for the town

The name started passing itself along almost right away. The Thompson & West History of Nevada, edited by Myron Angel in 1881, quotes the editor of the Territorial Enterprise: the first child born in the city arrived on April 1, 1860, the daughter of John H. and Levina S. Tilton, and “the child was named Virginia in honor of the new mining camp.”

Bancroft’s index lists her as “Tilton, Virginia, Virginia City named for,” which reads at first as if the town were named after the baby. It was the other way around: a man’s nickname named the town, and the town named the baby.

Sources & further reading

• William Wright (Dan De Quille), History of the Big Bonanza (1877). The 1859 names from Pleasant Hill to Virginia City, the Wun-u-muc-a proposal, and Comstock’s bottle story (p. 59); Comstock’s letter, with “first called Silver City” (p. 84); Fennimore’s death at Dayton in July 1861 (p. 87).
• H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming (1890). Fennimore, alias Finney, “dubbed by the miners Old Virginia” (p. 99); Ophir, Silver City, Virginia Town, and the unpopular Winnemucca idea (p. 106); the note quoting Comstock’s account (p. 108); the index entry under Tilton (index, citing p. 168).
• Myron Angel (ed.), History of Nevada (Thompson & West, 1881), p. 571. Virginia Tilton, born April 1, 1860, and named for the camp.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Both entries: for “Old Virginia,” and “named from the State.”
• GNIS feature 856420 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Virginia City, Storey County.