Mining Charity: Material Culture and Philanthropy on the Comstock Lode

Twenty-five miles south of Reno, Nevada, at what in 1877 was a bustling depot for the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, men loaded nearly one thousand pounds of silver bars into railway cars bound for New York City. The ore from which the silver was extracted had been mined in often dangerous conditions from the nearby Consolidated Virginia and California mines co-owned by John W. Mackay on the Comstock Lode, one of the richest deposits of silver ore in North America. More than a year later, New York City dock workers loaded that same one-half ton of silver onto a ship in preparation for an Atlantic crossing. No longer a sturdy shipment of silver bullion, however, these crates required careful packing to protect each piece of the expensive cargo: an elaborate 1,250-piece dinner and dessert service for twenty-four people. In the Mackays’ Parisian dining room, guests were greeted by a grand centerpiece along with gleaming meat and fish platters, pitchers, cutlery, candelabras with twenty-nine lights, and numerous specialized pieces, among them an ice cream serving dish, celery vases, grape dishes, crumb trays, and cigar holders.¹ Using a range of metalworking techniques, Tiffany & Co. craftsmen had decorated these spun and cast silver pieces with motifs influenced by designs and botanicals from around the world. Wildflowers, thistles, roses, clovers, and cherry blossoms were intermixed with elephant trunks, dragons, grapes, and East Asian, South Asian, and Near Eastern patterns. The dessert service, of which the cup and saucer pictured below were part, was made from silver-gilt and enamel and decorated with several kinds of foliage and interlocking patterns inspired by Indian and East Asian art (Figure 1).² Providing unity to the varied designs were a single coat of arms and a set of initials—MLM—for Marie Louise Mackay.

Upon its unveiling at the 1878 Paris Exposition, a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune observed that the vast quantity of silver used in the production of the Mackay silver service, the level of decoration, the skill of its makers, and its enormous cost made clear that “the service is a monument of the wealth of the owner.”³ Yet the ostentatiousness of the silver service was incongruous with the Mackays’ origins. John, who immigrated with his family from Ireland to New York City at age nine, was a shipbuilder’s apprentice who tried his luck first in California’s goldfields and then in Nevada’s silver mines. There, he met his wife, Marie Louise Hungerford Bryant, a recently widowed mother working as a seamstress and tutoring students in French and piano at St. Mary’s Catholic School.⁴ The Mackays accumulated an extraordinary amount of wealth on the Comstock Lode and were remembered for their philanthropic generosity towards alleviating material conditions on the Comstock—the same conditions that had produced their wealth.

Silver objects such as the Mackays’ dinner and dessert service contain many histories waiting to be interpreted—of craftsmanship, shifting design aesthetics, and changing social norms. These themes have dominated the interpretive questions scholars pose of such objects, the complex histories behind their making obscured by their decorative surfaces. The process of smelting and amalgamating raw silver ore, followed by the work of cloisonné enameling, repoussé chasing, engraving, gilding, die stamping, and piercing fretwork, obscures the labor performed by hundreds of miners to extract and process ore from deep beneath the earth’s surface. However, as recent scholarship investigating the ecological implications of art materials shows, the raw materials from which decorative objects were crafted present alternative interpretive possibilities, ranging from their environmental origins to the social histories tied to their extraction and processing.⁵

This article traces the Mackays’ silver service back to its origins as raw ore and the environment from which it was mined: the square-set timbered mines that ran beneath the streets of Virginia City, Nevada. Scholars have explored the extractive labor associated with silver in both colonial and modern contexts, particularly in the context of Latin America, focusing especially on environmental histories and unfree labor. In this article, I shift this conversation both geographically and thematically: to the particularities of mining the Comstock, the dangerous conditions its environment posed, and the nature of the mining society that emerged in Nevada’s high desert. In doing so, I examine the needs of Comstock residents, the support services and institutions established in response to those needs, and the important role played by philanthropic work in shaping the community. The material conditions of mining, I argue, were central factors in determining the kinds of philanthropic efforts mounted to address those needs. Environmental and worksite hazards, the rapid growth and transience of mining town populations, and economic downturns shaped the formation of charitable organizations, institutions, and individual philanthropic efforts. In turn, that philanthropy shaped not only residents’ social and cultural lives, but also the built environment in which they lived. Methodologically, this article advocates for employing a source base that expands beyond objects directly tied to philanthropic actions and reads texts and images alongside the technological objects that shaped miners’ daily work, patent objects developed in response to the challenges and dangers of mining, and the built environment realized through philanthropic actions.

For centuries, silver, as a precious metal, had been used not only as currency, but as a material to craft objects related to status definition and religious ritual. In the nineteenth century United States, silver objects marked civic and personal achievements, taking the form of presentation urns, vases, cups, and swords, among others. Silver table services, coffee and tea sets, cutlery, tureens, punch bowls, and candelabras had adorned American sideboards and parlor tables for decades. Although the ostentatiousness of the Mackays’ service was incomparable, tea and coffee services were popular, and formal sets appeared in the parlors of many monied Americans.⁶ The coffeepot pictured here, for example, was made by Tiffany & Co. and used for entertaining guests in Charlotte Ellis Danforth’s Massachusetts home (Figure 2). In the late nineteenth century, such a coffee or tea service was generally regarded as a mark of refinement among American families. But the cool, mirrorlike sheen of this polished silver coffeepot is incongruous with the appearance of the unprocessed silver ore from which it was crafted, and the refined domestic setting in which it was used to entertain contrasted sharply with the stifling heat and dirt associated with the dangerous and even deadly labor required to mine and process the ore.

Scalding water, plummeting cage elevators, cave-ins, fiery explosions, toxic air. These were among the many hazards of silver ore mining on Nevada’s Comstock Lode in the late 1800s—hazards that left people scarred, paralyzed, and dead. In the quest to mine silver ore, children were orphaned, women were widowed, and men were injured and unable to work to support themselves. Historians have documented the human and environmental costs of silver mining, among them cave-ins, rockslides, silica inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, exposure to mercury used in the amalgamation process, and toxic materials released into the environment.⁷ On the Comstock, new developments in the material culture of mining technology simultaneously lessened some of mining’s dangers while increasing others.⁸

From the 1860s until the mines went bust in the 1890s, the promise of silver lured men and women to the Comstock Lode on the slopes of Mount Davidson, a place known as “our Pine-nut mountains” to Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute woman and seasonal Comstock resident.⁹ Immigrants from England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Mexico, China, New Zealand, and other countries joined Northern Paiute people and Euro-Americans from across the Midwest and East Coast to create the communities of Virginia City and Gold Hill (Figure 3). Settlers of these communities and neighboring ranches and towns appropriated Northern Paiute homelands.¹⁰ There, as elsewhere in Nevada, settlers felled pinyon pines and grazed cattle in meadows, destroying important Northern Paiute food sources, straining resources, transforming the environment and its ecologies, and instigating violent conflicts in the process.¹¹ In 1860, the population at the base of Mt. Davidson was 3,000; by 1875, Virginia City and Gold Hill made up a bustling urban center populated by 25,000 people, including single men and women, families, and orphaned children, ranging from destitute people to newly minted millionaires such as the Mackays. Men, the majority of whom were involved in mining, made up nearly 70 percent of the population.¹²

Many men who mined the Comstock Lode had developed their skills in the California goldfields as miners and laborers. However, hard rock mining required different methods and presented new environmental hazards as men tunneled deep into the ground to access and remove pockets of ore. Silver mining required removing vast quantities of rock because silver is typically found in ore combined with other elements, such as zinc, sulfur, and lead, from which it must be extracted by smelting or chemical leaching processes such as amalgamation, in which ore is pulverized with mercury (Figure 4). The Comstock’s geological formations and spatial voids created by ore removal, combined with wet, porous, and crushed quartz, created prime conditions for cave-ins.¹³ This engineering challenge was mitigated by the construction of an intricate network of tunnels supported by a honeycomb of square-set timbering that ran beneath the towns of Gold Hill and Virginia City, as depicted in this 1876 engraved print (Figure 5). Although a sanitized perspective of the mines and tunnel network, this image nevertheless offers evidence of the dangers posed by silver mining work conditions. Shirtless white men with pants rolled to their knees suggesting the stiflingly hot work conditions; the long shaft through which hotter, deeper levels of the mine were reached via cage; the need for a “cooling off” space; the precarious nature of “sinking a winze” to connect different levels of the mine; and the use of lanterns and candles to light surroundings amongst flammable materials, all while rock was constantly being broken away and hauled to the surface, together portray the difficulty of this labor.

The seemingly innocuous task of lighting one’s work posed dangers such that Comstock resident and mining engineer Theodore Washburn patented a “miners’ safety candlestick” in 1872 (Figure 6).¹⁴ Prior to the use of headlamps, miners used lanterns or candlesticks to light the area in which they worked. The sharp spike on these iron candlestick holders could be hammered into a wooden support timber or a rock wall. The candle was secured in the circular holder. As an improvement, Washburn’s model included a spring-loaded attachment to extinguish the candle when it burned low. Washburn’s attempt to secure a patent is evidence both of his own entrepreneurial interests and a desire to improve safety within the mines. His efforts provide valuable information about a tangible problem that needed to be solved. In this case, Washburn, using his knowledge as a mining engineer, manipulated an object common to miners to improve its safety. In his patent application, Washburn wrote, “By this means numerous fires can be prevented, especially in mines where the candle often burns down and then drops through the socket in a burning condition upon some inflammable substance.”¹⁵ And “well-timbered Comstock mines” were filled with such substances. According to one observer, “the amount of lumber packed into a mine is so great and the draught in case of fire is so violent that hurricanes of flames and smoke leap through the narrow channels of rock and beat in resistless waves to the remotest opening.”¹⁶ This was an experience with which Comstock residents were familiar. In 1869, a fire, rumored to have been started by a dropped candle, raged at the 800-foot level of the Yellow Jacket Mine, killing dozens of miners.¹⁷

Dynamite, mechanical rock drills, and new hoisting and timbering technologies allowed miners to tunnel deeper into the earth, where the heat exuded from rock raised the air temperature to between 100- and 125-degrees Fahrenheit. The wet, poorly ventilated spaces in which men worked created “an optimal breeding ground for the spread of respiratory and infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever.”¹⁸ Pneumatic drills pulverized rock, speeding the rate by which ore was mined, but also increasing men’s inhalation of silica. Hoists and cables lowered men nearly 3,000 feet down the mineshafts in a hoisting cage. A platform on which multiple men could stand while they ascended or descended the shaft, hoisting cages traveled at a speed of 400 to 800 feet per minute.¹⁹ At the left of this detail from an 1868 photograph, three men stand inside a cage, which hovers over the open mineshaft (Figure 7). To the right, in another cage, a miner stands behind a cart. The miners are standing on a “simple platform, 5 or 6 feet square” which was “formed of wrought-iron bars firmly joined and covered by a floor of wood.” Two sides of the cage were made of “a simple but stout framework of wrought iron, 7 or 8 feet high, joined at the top by a central cross-bar” that attached to a vertical rod to which a hoisting cable was connected. This photograph is taken such that the viewer is looking directly at the remaining two sides, which, in this case, were left open, but some designs included a safety bar.²⁰ Many accidents involved cages, whether due to a misstep, operator error, or equipment failure.²¹

Comstock newspapers carried regular reports of mining accidents. Underground workers died from falls, elevator malfunctions, premature explosions, cave-ins, and scalding pockets of underground water. When miners penetrated through rock, steam and scalding water from aquifers could pour into the tunnel, sending miners scrambling into cages to be hoisted up. When those cages malfunctioned or collapsed, men could plummet to their deaths. In one incident, four miners were on a cage that was “run past the proper place of stopping,” pitching them out. As a result, one man fell out of the cage and rolled off a ledge, falling “to the bottom of the vertical shaft, a distance of 1,300 feet, where his body was found, a mangled, shapeless mass of flesh.”²² Another miner was seriously injured 1,900 feet underground when a pump was being installed. He died a few hours later, leaving behind a wife and three children.²³ Likewise, another woman with two children was widowed when her husband was hit by a heavy timber that sent him plummeting six hundred feet, breaking his arms, legs, ribs, and skull.²⁴

Although these men had no chance of recovery from such catastrophic accidents, many other accidents were not deadly but were nevertheless devastating, and working conditions could be deleterious to miners’ health. Recovery from mining accidents could be long and arduous, result in lost wages, and lead to permanent loss of movement. Miner William Neely, for instance, spent at least one month recovering in the hospital after his arm was badly crushed during a cave-in. “The upper bone of his arm was so badly smashed that it had to be removed from the shoulder socket nearly to the elbow,” reported the Gold Hill Daily News. His arm, it was expected, would “still be a serviceable one.”²⁵ Others survived the initial accident, but eventually died of their injuries, as in the case of Patrick Tracy, who was caught in a winze while helping to lower an iron plunger weighing between one and two tons. He was cared for in the hospital for several days before rupturing an artery while turning himself over in bed.²⁶

In addition to such acute injuries, the mining environment posed long-term health hazards. Tuberculosis, silicosis, and other chronic pulmonary diseases resulted from months and years of constant inhalation of dust particles created by blasting rock and pneumatic drills, which used compressed air to drill. Miners suffered the effects of what was later known as silico-tuberculosis, the symptoms of which include weakness, persistent coughs, difficulty breathing, and tiredness.²⁷ On June 4, 1880, approximately 30 percent of the Storey County Hospital’s patients were miners, many of whom were admitted for either “debility” or pulmonary problems ranging from pthisis (silicosis) to inflammation to hemorrhage of the lungs.²⁸ Such acute and chronic illnesses and injuries—and the resulting financial and familial circumstances—created at the intersections of labor, technology, safety, and the environment, were a significant part of the context in which philanthropic efforts took shape in Comstock society.

In the 1860s, the Euro-American Comstock community and its built environment were being constructed from the ground up. Initially, quickly constructed wooden housing and tents were erected, but as the population grew, the built environment was transformed. Mine tunnels were dug, streets were mapped, and more permanent buildings were constructed. The many institutions, businesses, and services that structured nineteenth century Euro-Americans’ lives were beginning to be built. Yet the Comstock, like most mining districts, posed challenges to community building due to the dangers of hard rock mining, boom and bust economic cycles, and the related transience of its population. As one doctor observed of Virginia City in 1865, “The character of the people is such as is usual in mining districts, all kinds and conditions flocking hither to better themselves, and migrating as soon as their finances will allow.” This, he explained, resulted in a “constantly shifting” population of which “a statement perfectly correct to-day would be wholly inaccurate in a month or two.”²⁹ While this population often came and went when their luck played out, many Indigenous people were compelled to leave the Comstock district as it expanded. As Mattie, a Northern Paiute woman, later reflected, “Every place which we had held and where there was good soil and good water was taken and fenced in as a white man’s claim.”³⁰ Others remained and they, as well as Chinese people, lived on Virginia City’s geographic margins and played important roles in Comstock society, including working as day laborers and housekeepers.³¹

Despite the well-known transience of mining towns that resulted from people trying their luck and moving on, many residents hoped to create stability and permanence on the Comstock, an effort that focused on providing support for miners and attracting families. As the population rapidly grew, organizations were founded, providing structure in a place formed by people arriving from diverse geographic locations and backgrounds. People established numerous lodges and fraternal organizations, along with women’s auxiliaries, many of which had ethnic affiliations, such as the Italian Benevolent Society and Irish military companies.³² Labor organizations, most notably miners’ unions, were formed to not only protect wages and advocate for improved working conditions, but also to provide benefits to dues-paying members, including care during illnesses and funeral expense contributions.³³ These unions also supported public events, the public library, and St. Mary Louise Hospital.³⁴ Hospitals, schools, orphanages, and relief for the poor were among the efforts supported and run by Catholic sisters and Catholic and Protestant lay women. Fundraising fairs were embraced by Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and secular organizations to raise money for charitable, religious, educational, and medical projects.

As in other communities, racism and nativism shaped who benefitted from philanthropic projects. Although the district’s population was made up of people from different ethnicities and races, it was far from integrated. Chinese and Northern Paiute people were among those discriminated against and excluded from a range of workplaces, organizations, and charitable aid. In Virginia City’s Chinatown, men “joined fraternal, district, and family associations as a means of obtaining companionship, protection, mutual aid, funding for major endeavors, and employment assistance.”³⁵ In reporting on the needs of Northern Paiute people, Comstock newspapers did so primarily in reference to the US Bureau of Indian Affairs and policies related to reservations. Needs of Northern Paiute people living in the immediate area were simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, often portrayed as a natural consequence of racial inferiority. One news reporter, in describing a house being built by a man known to white residents as Indian Charley, declared the combination of Paiute and Euro-American building materials and furnishings to be “a heterogeneous conglomeration of rubbish singularly put together.” Of the quality of craftmanship, the reporter wrote, “Indians are proverbially awkward with tools, and Charley is no exception in this respect.”³⁶ Another article, in conveying local gossip, referenced as a stock character “the lowest, or humblest Piute that walks the streets, or searches in the depths of the swill barrel in the rear of restaurants and hotels.”³⁷ Comstock resident Mary McNair Matthews simultaneously considered Northern Paiute people as “very harmless” and “quite civilized, many of them living in shanty houses,” and described Northern Paiute women as “quite industrious…always ready and willing to wash or do any kind of work for you; but they want their price.”³⁸

Like Northern Paiute people, Chinese men took advantage of economic niches, particularly the laundry industry.³⁹ Job discrimination meant that nonwhite Comstock residents were generally excluded from the mining industry itself. Miners’ unions, for instance, while founded to protect the life and livelihood of miners, also worked to ensure that only white men had access to mining jobs. Indeed, Dawes’ cutaway view of Comstock Mining accurately depicts white miners working in all levels of the mine, from sinking a winze to erecting square set timbering to swinging a pickaxe (Figure 5). In a society dominated by a single industry, maintaining community support enabled the miners’ unions to succeed in many of their efforts to negotiate wages and working conditions with the mining corporations.⁴⁰ White miners were particularly adamant that Chinese men be prevented from working in the mines, simultaneously intending to “maintain the wages of labor at a satisfactory standard, and to prevent the firm seating of Chinese labor in our midst.”⁴¹ They succeeded at both: a $4 daily wage and Chinese exclusion from the mines. Although this meant that Chinese men were less likely to experience the physical dangers of hard rock mining, they remained susceptible to mining-related financial downturns, communicable diseases, and other challenges of Comstock life.

When it came to hospital treatment, Chinese, Northern Paiute, and Black people all appear to have been able to access at least some degree of care, given that people from each of these backgrounds are mentioned as patients in the Storey County Hospital.⁴² In one instance, a young Northern Paiute boy who lost his leg in an attempt to jump into a moving railroad car was stabilized and recovering at the County Hospital before his family took him home. The hospital’s doctor protested, but provided them with medical supplies and later went to check on the boy at his home on the outskirts of town.⁴³ By contrast, in another incident in which a Northern Paiute man’s legs were crushed by a train car in nearby Reno, the newspaper reported that curious white citizens “went to look upon the poor wreck, but he was only an Indian and there was not much fuss made over him.”⁴⁴ Such racism, combined with discrimination related to relief and access to institutions, made the challenges of Comstock life all the harder for nonwhite residents to endure and, in some cases, survive.

Comstock residents navigated a charitable landscape that was significantly shaped by the 1864 arrival of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic religious organization. Indeed, according to historian Anne Butler, the Comstock community’s needs “closely meshed with the stated directive of their religious organization—carrying physical and spiritual comfort to the sick and afflicted of a community.”⁴⁵ Upon their arrival, the sisters found the spaces promised to them uninhabitable, but they quickly worked to establish a combination boarding school and orphanage, as well as a much-needed hospital. The sisters’ new hospital was welcomed by the community, even though the Storey County Hospital had been expanded a few years prior after being deemed “too small to comfortably contain all the sick persons who apply for admittance” and in need of additional rooms “to confine insane persons.”⁴⁶ When the sisters’ hospital opened, a local newspaper declared that “a good work of charity has been inaugurated in Virginia [City], by the efficient St. Vincent De Paul society. God bless it.” Patients’ costs for care were “fixed at the lowest possible figure,” while those who were “utterly destitute” were supported by contributions.⁴⁷

Initially established as a single ward inside a building opposite the Catholic church, the sisters quickly discovered that the medical needs of the community were far greater than available space could accommodate. Indeed, as one sister wrote, “the poor miners who live in the bowels of the earth frequently suffer from ill health and sometimes encounter serious accidents.”⁴⁸ The Gold Hill Daily News hoped that a suitable building might soon become available, but in the meantime, the sisters were faced with the task of raising money.⁴⁹

During the thirty years that the sisters were active in Virginia City, they relied on a core group of laywomen to raise funds for their charitable work. To do so, they forged cooperative relationships with fellow Catholics, as well as Protestant and Jewish people who contributed to charitable work and community building.⁵⁰ The level of cooperation in their fundraising is striking given the widespread tensions that existed between Protestant charitable groups and Catholic nuns within other US communities, but it was not altogether unusual, as similar partnerships were formed in other western mining communities.⁵¹ Certainly anti-Catholic sentiments periodically reared their head, but as Anne Butler argues, “these controversies paled beside the solid record the sisters built with many non-Catholic associates.”⁵²

There was much to be gained through such cooperation. The instability of mining communities—over 90 percent of people moved on within ten years—played a role in prompting people to make a concerted effort to support groups who were willing to establish the schools, hospitals, and other community-based institutions that were considered essential to attracting families and ensuring the long-term stability of the community. With their prior involvement in health care, Catholic sisters had the knowledge and experience to establish hospitals, as well as connections to a broader Catholic network from which to seek advice in their efforts. Collaboration with, and support for, the sisters stood to benefit the community as a whole; men and women had a vested interest in supporting those who were able to facilitate the building of institutions and the provision of relief. By soliciting donations, selling raffle tickets, and encouraging public attendance at benefit dinners, dances, and theater productions, laypeople used their own social networks to raise funds for the sisters’ work and that of other organizations.⁵³ The proceeds could be substantial, as in 1873, when a St. Patrick’s Day public festival and ball garnered $4,500 for the sisters’ work.⁵⁴

While the Daughters of Charity quickly established themselves as a fixture in the landscape of Comstock philanthropic work, other societies, churches, and individuals played active roles in attending to the community’s needs. Fundraising events for charitable causes not only supported practical relief efforts in communities but also contributed significantly to the social life of these mining towns. Indeed, throughout the United States, fundraising fairs provided entertainment for both men and women, helped build a sense of community, and reflected Americans’ attitudes toward consumption.⁵⁵ In Virginia City, fairs, plays, balls, and other entertainments were attended by the larger community. Elaborate fairs might run for a week at a time and were a place in which men and women mingled while they visited various booths, bought raffles, enjoyed food, and danced. The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise frequently published articles relating the latest efforts of, and events hosted by, the “charitable ladies” of the city.

In 1871, William J. Evans was the object of one such event advertised as a “social hop.” An immigrant from Aberystwyth, Wales, Evans was a miner who was paralyzed and unable to work. Living in a community where mining was men’s primary occupation, Evans’ hopes of supporting himself were crushed, and he, like many miners, had no familial support system on which to rely—his wife and three children were in Wales. Lacking sufficient funds, a return to his family also seemed unlikely. The Ladies’ Mite Society of Gold Hill, however, took special note of his case and organized a charitable ball for his benefit. Comstock resident Mary Brewster was more than willing to take part in the evening’s activities. “Mr. Sherman asked us to go up to a Mite. It was to be a dance and an extreme affair, for the benefit of a paraletic man, they are going to send him to England.” While Brewster explained the purpose of the event, her enjoyment came primarily from the opportunity to attend a social gathering. “We had a pleasant ride and a pleasant evening,” she noted, and arrived home at 1 o’clock in the morning.⁵⁶ Raising $374.00 in a single night, the Mite Society was able to send Evans “home to his family and friends in England in good style.”⁵⁷ Following his departure, however, Evans condition deteriorated, and he died enroute, buried at sea in the Pacific. The secretary of the Mite Society wrote to Evans’ wife after receiving news of his death to both express his condolences and to ensure that she had received $150 that had been forwarded to her from the charity event held for her husband.⁵⁸

The host of this benefit, the Ladies’ Mite Society of Gold Hill, was an Episcopal Church organization that offered regular opportunities for socializing, including theatrical and musical acts, as well as literary presentations and balls. The name “mite” reflected the expectation that attendees would donate a small amount of money (a mite) to charity.⁵⁹ Such charitable societies provided an important venue for socialization in transient mining communities, particularly for women like Mary Brewster, who was unmarried and thirty-six years old when she moved from Massachusetts to the Comstock hoping to secure a teaching position. “Every Thurs. night,” Brewster related, “brings its Mite Society. The object is charity. One night we had the little Drama of the Cottage by the sea, very interesting. The next Thurs. a dance indeed every other evening is devoted to dancing.”⁶⁰ The Mite Society was also a venue in which Brewster presented her poetry. She wrote, “I have at last been persuaded to join the Mite Society and have written a little poem to Mt. Davidson to read tomorrow night.” She took pride in the fact that it “was listened to attentively and applauded loudly. And all my friends congratulated me. So of course I was happy.” According to the Territorial Enterprise, “The Hall was well filled with a much pleased and appreciative audience…Miss Brewster cited in a very acceptable manner an original poem entitled ‘Mount Davidson’—a real gem in its way.”⁶¹

In writing about her experiences with the Mite Society and other charitable groups, Brewster was clearly cognizant of the purpose of these charitable activities, but her reflections focused on the social and cultural aspects of the events. Watching plays, listening to musical performances, taking opportunities to read her own poetry, mingling with female friends, and being escorted to dances by male companions were clearly the highlights of these events for Brewster, who declared, “I enjoy the dances very much. I always have good partners and plenty of them, the Virginia [City] gentlemen I like the best.”⁶² Fundraisers benefited the community not only in the funds that were raised but also by providing a space in which community ties were forged, where women participated in public life, and social life was enjoyed.

Such fundraising supported charitable causes ranging from aiding specific individuals, as in the case of miner William Evans, to the founding and operation of institutions that served the broader community, among them schools, an orphanage, and a hospital. Numerous efforts responded to specific crises or circumstances, ranging from foul weather to fires to economic downturns. In 1877, for instance, during a period of economic stagnation, a notice in the Lyon County Times read as follows: “Feeding the Hungry—The free lunch house for the benefit of destitute people has been opened in Virginia [City].”⁶³ According to Mary McNair Matthews, she and Rachel Beck founded the lunch house in response to the “number of poor people in the streets” and fear that the city “would be burned for the sake of plunder.” The women arranged for donations of foodstuffs and broken spice and grocery packages from restaurants, cracked dishes for cooking and serving, baked goods from individuals, day-old bread from bakers, and monetary donations. With these provisions, they, along with two others, cooked and served three meals daily. Despite the donation of goods, however, the lunch-house proved unsustainable after just over one month in operation due to additional expenditures and the inability to raise sufficient funds. Nevertheless, in addition to serving hundreds of people daily, Matthews and Beck were also able to provide food for eight to ten families during a period of significant need.⁶⁴

The lunch-house, like so many spaces in the Comstock’s built environment, admitted only white residents of the community. Matthews and Beck claimed to provide food to “the poor people in the streets,” but they actively excluded the fifteen to twenty Northern Paiute and Chinese people who sat outside the doorway during mealtimes. Matthews joined thousands of Euro-Americans—and Comstock miners’ union members—in expressing her belief that Chinese people were “the curse of the Pacific Coast” and “should be banished from the land.” Her disdain for throwing out food apparently outweighed her racism, however. She prided herself on the fact that “if we had any soup left, we never threw it out, neither did we keep it to sour.” They could always “find plenty of Chinese and Piutes to give it to,” she noted.⁶⁵

While Matthews’s lunch house and many fundraisers were intended to provide relief in the short-term, other philanthropic work focused on building institutions that would not only serve but also anchor the community and thereby its built environment. The way in which people discussed the benefit of such institutions, especially schools, often revealed the bigoted and racist beliefs that underlay their charitable work. Support for schools and advocacy for taxes to pay for them were important issues because schools were considered critical to persuading families to remain on the Comstock and providing stability for the community. As one editorial writer argued, “It is to our Public Schools that we must look to give us a permanent population composed of steady, industrious, home-loving, moral, Church going families.”⁶⁶ The permanent population they sought to attract was also defined by their whiteness. Funded primarily by taxes, public schools were prohibited from allowing the attendance of Black, Indigenous, and Chinese students, “with a severe penalty…attached to any district that will admit children of any of the proscribed races into the Public Schools of this State.” Efforts were purportedly made to establish a segregated public school for Indigenous, Chinese, and Black children, but these efforts were hampered, according to the county superintendent of public instruction, by “mutual prejudices existing of one race against another, almost, if not quite, as strong as that of the superior race, which bolts the doors of educational halls against them all.”⁶⁷ In 1866, the Gold Hill Daily News estimated that “colored citizens have paid into the several county treasuries not less than six thousand dollars for the benefit of the School Funds, and yet not one dollar has been awarded them for the education of their children.”⁶⁸ The number of public schools increased with the growing population of Storey County and although primarily funded by public tax monies, benefits were frequently held to raise money in support of the schools. When the Virginia City Fourth Ward school was built in 1876 to relieve overcrowding, it was funded partly through subscriptions from individuals as well as mining and business firms, and by holding fundraisers. A superintendent of the Chollar-Potosi mine donated the land for a broad walkway leading to the school. At four stories tall, the building accommodated more than one thousand students and was equipped with some of the most modern technologies, including ventilators to draw in fresh air and flushing toilets.⁶⁹ At the time it opened, the Territorial Enterprise deemed the school “the pride” of Virginia City.⁷⁰

While the families served by such schools were considered critical to the longevity of Comstock communities, those families could also be severely affected by the hazards of mining. Numerous men killed in accidents were husbands and fathers, and their deaths could bring financial hardship or devastation. The Daughters of Charity opened their orphanage and school in 1864 in a single room where they accommodated twelve children. Within a year, 112 students attended the school and twenty-five children lived with the sisters. The sisters provided a home for miners’ children, along with “little ones sent to them by the County Commissioners” from across Nevada, and “the children of a soldier of the Nevada Volunteers, who died in the service of his country.”⁷¹ The sisters’ orphanage was financially supported by the State of Nevada for several years, but fundraising and in-kind donations remained central to supporting the facility.⁷² Indeed, Mary Matthews noted that she took excess food donations from the lunch-house to the orphanage.⁷³ This institution played an important role in the Comstock community. As the report of a Senate Committee on State Affairs explained following a visit to the Daughters of Charity’s orphanage, “In our section of the country, where sudden deaths of laboring men, who have families, are frequent, where very few private individual are able or willing to adopt little children, the necessity for an Orphan Asylum is apparent and imperative.”⁷⁴ Indeed, while children without parents lived at the orphanage, many others who boarded were children with single parents. As Anne Butler notes, the “sisters’ facility, long before the professionalization of social work, combined aspects of school, orphanage, boardinghouse, and day-care center.”⁷⁵ When a parent died, a job was lost, an illness resulted in lost wages, or a family otherwise found themselves in distress, families might turn to the sisters for assistance.

While the sisters were actively running their orphanage, school, and small hospital, they continued fundraising for the hospital they intended to build. After more than ten years of fundraising, in 1876, St. Mary Louise Hospital was built on land purchased and donated by Louise Mackay, who had both a religious and personal connection to the sisters, given that she was Catholic and once taught at the sisters’ school to support herself following her first husband’s death. Other benefactors donated essential supplies and furnishings, including a kitchen range and ironing apparatus. John Mackay provided cords of wood and ten tons of coal. But it was the steady support of the citizens of Virginia City and Gold Hill through which the building was erected. In addition, a Miners’ Union tax supported the hospital, where 20 percent of the patients in 1876 and 1877 were admitted for trauma. When the hospital admitted its first patient, a woman with paralysis, the Gold Hill Daily News noted, “the need of a private hospital, in which the sick, as well as those injured in the mines, could receive careful treatment and nursing, has been long felt in the community.”⁷⁶

Rising four stories and built on six acres, this brick facility was the most modern hospital in Nevada and could accommodate more than seventy patients in its thirty-six-room layout, which included both large wards and private rooms (Figure 8). The building was designed to accommodate the day-to-day functions of a hospital, including an operating room and doctor’s office, as well as communal spaces for use by both patients and the sisters, including two dining rooms and two parlors. Preparatory spaces also factored into the building’s design, with rooms set aside on each floor “from which the patients are supplied with medicines and food.” In addition to the main building, the hospital had a steam and wash house, where patients’ clothing and bedding could be “boiled by steam” for sanitary purposes. The building was steam-heated throughout, boasted water closets and bathrooms on each floor, and included marble-top washstands that were plumbed for both hot and cold water. Patients also had access to a chapel, as well as reading rooms stocked with daily papers, journals, and other periodicals.⁷⁷ The hospital claimed a prominent place in the charitable landscape of the Comstock, both through its work and its physical presence in the built environment. The four-story imposing building “dominated the base of Six Mile Canyon,” simultaneously a material reminder of the hazards of mining and philanthropic efforts to respond to them.⁷⁸

St. Mary Louise Hospital was erected one year before John and Louise Mackay commissioned Tiffany & Co. to design and craft their extravagant silver service. John purportedly liked “the notion of eating off silver brought from the Comstock,” and when Louise saw the set, she was remembered as saying “Something memorable from our own mine. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I have. But even after seeing the designs, I couldn’t imagine how splendid it could be.”⁷⁹ Louise’s favorite item, according to her granddaughter, was the tea set, which she had instructed Tiffany to craft from the “first shipment of silver which John had sent them. This was the silver which he himself carried out of the Con Virginia” mine.⁸⁰ As a shipbuilder’s apprentice who became a miner and then an unlikely millionaire, John Mackay understood first-hand the contrast between the remarkable silver set his wife commissioned and the labor required to obtain the raw material from which it was produced. In 1878, both the Mackays’ silver service and Pacific Coast minerals were displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition. The latter display was funded by John Mackay, who provided $5,000 to defray the cost of shipping the collection to Paris. More than one thousand specimens were exhibited, including a large pyramid of ore extracted from Mackay’s Consolidated Virginia mine.⁸¹ And yet the ore and the silver service were displayed in separate exhibits, then, as now, divorcing the beauty of the refined decorative objects from the raw materials from which they were produced. But what if we changed this and displayed the ore next to the silver service?

Glancing into a museum gallery, some visitors have preconceived notions about what they will learn from labels accompanying a silver tureen; they are prepared to learn about the owner of the tureen, its maker, nineteenth century social practices, or changing silver designs. Perhaps, too, about the lives of silversmiths. But by broadening the contexts in which such objects are interpreted to include the work of acquiring the raw materials, we gain different interpretive opportunities.

Works of art, Laura Igoe has argued, “tend to obfuscate their environmental origins and the social conditions that contributed to their realization.” As this article shows, beneath the polished surface of silver decorative objects are not only histories of labor, environmental and occupational hazards, and technological development, but also histories of racism, community building, public health, religion, and social and cultural life. All of these histories intertwine with the history of philanthropy. What, then, counts as a “philanthropy object”? Miners’ candlesticks, square-set timbers, cages, broken lunch-house plates, a donated stove, hospital and school buildings, silver services, fundraising ephemera—these are among the many objects that shaped or were shaped by the intersection of the Comstock environment, labor, and politicized and racist ideas that determined who should and could benefit from philanthropy. They are objects that offer analytical opportunities and prompt from different angles questions about mining charity. When placed into conversation with textual and visual sources, these objects deepen our understanding of Comstock community needs and the philanthropic support mounted to attend to them.

Examining the labor required to extract raw materials and the production processes required to transform silver into those decorative objects with which we are most familiar brings into sharper relief the hazards that existed in silver mining communities, how they were experienced, the ways in which people worked to combat and reinforce them, the charitable work people mounted, and the inequalities it reproduced. Although this article focuses on Comstock silver mining, its general approach translates across time and space. Attending to the deeper, longer history of how objects came to be enables us to bring into dialogue seemingly unrelated objects and collections to produce rich, nuanced interpretations of the past—unexpected interpretations that have the potential to disrupt the narratives with which we and our publics are more familiar.

Comstock history is not widely known due in part to the fact that, despite the relatively long prosperity of Virginia City and Gold Hill compared to most mining towns, mismanagement and depleted ore veins ultimately led to their decline. In 1897, the Daughters of Charity shuttered their school, hospital, and convent, and left the community. Today, Virginia City is but a few streets of the bustling urban center that it once was, but the material culture of the Comstock and mining philanthropy continues to persist and to be interpreted.

On a trip to Virginia City in 2023, I revisited several buildings that I had first encountered on a research trip nearly twenty years ago. This time, I took my family through a damp tunnel supported by square-set timbering in the Chollar Mine to see silver ore veins lit by the dim light of a miner’s candlestick hammered into the rock wall. In the hot, high desert sun, they waited while I examined—and imagined—a now-rusted cage that once lowered miners thousands of feet down a mineshaft. We toured the Historic Fourth Ward School Museum, where, following a building restoration supported by grants and individual acts of philanthropy, visitors can learn about Comstock history and engage with exhibits in period classrooms. I listened to my five-year-old daughter, Ava, as she sat in a school desk, observing the ways in which the classroom differed from her own. And I walked outside the St. Mary Louise Hospital building where, in the former wards in which injured miners once recovered, St. Mary’s Art Center now hosts exhibitions, workshops, artists’ retreats, and ghost tours.⁸²

My own engagement with the built environment and surviving material culture of Virginia City has been shaped by my archival and object-based research, but those experiences also prompted me to ask new questions of the archival materials I first encountered two decades ago. It is in the interweaving of these material, textual, and visual sources that a multi-faceted narrative emerges—one about how the effort to extract ore reshaped the slopes of Mount Davidson into an unlikely urban center and, in the process, contributed to the broader destruction of Northern Paiute homelands. It is a history of how malfunctioning equipment, scalding water, and fine dust particles created hazards for a white mining workforce in towns whose economy depended on mines’ profitability. These are the stories of how philanthropic work and fundraising shaped residents’ social and cultural lives, as well as the built environment in which they lived. It is the work of using unlikely objects and the surviving bits and pieces of the material world to piece together the historical context of mining charity and to understand its legacies for the present.