"I'll Take Biggest Little City for $200, Alex"

I always enjoy reading the Lake Tahoe This Week posts by my colleagues over on our sister site, Tahoe.com. Sometimes they’ll do a piece like Five Interesting Facts About the Lake, and even though Tahoe is my bread and butter, I am usually happily surprised to learn something new from the blog. So this week, I thought we’d do something similar with Reno, and hopefully I’ll have one or two bits of local trivia for you that you didn’t know before. Photo at left: Facebook, City of Reno Government.

First of all, where does the name of the town even come from? Before there was a Reno, there was Lake’s Crossing, a community that grew up around a toll bridge over the Truckee River. “If it was a toll bridge over the Truckee, why wasn’t it called River Crossing instead of Lake’s Crossing?” you ask, and I want you know that I don’t think any less of you for doing so. The fact of the matter is that it was a fellow named Myron Lake who owned the toll bridge, and in naming it after himself it became, well, you know – Lake’s Crossing. It wasn’t until the railroad came through the area and put a depot in at Lake’s Crossing that it got the name we know it by today. The railroad construction supervisor named it in honor of Major General Jesse Lee Reno, an officer who fought for the Union and was killed in the Civil War. Photo at right: Wikimedia Commons, Ken Lund.

Of course, you can hardly talk about Reno without acknowledging its nickname of Biggest Little City. It was back in the 1920s that the promoters of Reno sponsored a contest for an official marketing slogan. “Biggest Little City in the World” was chosen, and they even announced it on the downtown arch that had been built a few years earlier to celebrate the completion of the Lincoln Highway and the Victory Highway. But for decades before that, lots of different towns across the country had touted themselves as the biggest little city in whatever part of the world they happened to be in. Reno had been tagged as both the Biggest Little City on the Pacific Coast and as the Biggest Little City on the Map long before it decided to really go for the gusto and claim the title of Biggest Little City in the World in 1929. Photo at left: Pixabay, C. Christian Andersen.

So that’s Reno, but what about Sparks, the other half of our own set of twin cities? For the longest time, I thought the name had something to do with sparks coming out of the smokestacks of the trains going through the area. But even though the community did come into being because of the railroad (it served as a switching yard for the Southern Pacific Railroad), it is actually named after Governor John Sparks, whose ranch was in the area.

Another local name that causes its share of confusion is the Truckee Meadows. The town of Truckee is up in the mountains on Interstate 80 as you head west over the hill to Sacramento, and the Truckee River flows out of Lake Tahoe, crosses the California state line and flows down into the interior of Nevada and eventually to Pyramid Lake. The flatlands between the foothills of the Eastern Sierra (the Verdi area) and the canyons east of Sparks are the Truckee Meadows. The U.S. Geologic Survey defines the borders as being the Carson Range to the west, Peavine to the north, the Virginia Range to the east and Steamboat to the south, but I can’t tell you how many people I chat with who think that the Truckee Meadows are those beautiful fields up by the town of Truckee that are actually part of the Martis Valley area. And as for the word itself, it comes from a member of the Paiute tribe who helped guide emigrants through the area back in the mid-1800s. Photo at right: Flickr, Ken Lund.

Good stuff, right? And if you’re ever on Jeopardy! and the category has to do with Reno-area name origins, I fully expect you to cut me in for a share of the winnings. (And, yes, I absolutely know that I gave Sparks the fuzzy end of the lollipop this week. I'll make it up sometime soon, I promise!)