That structure is what's left of the Poison Creek stage station and it's only maybe 7 or 8 miles from my house. Not a whole lot of info to be found on it but it looks to have been built in 1913. There were wooden structures there before the stone building replaced them. I'm not sure when it was taken out of service. It's on the historic registry but I couldn't find any photos earlier than 1976 when it had long since been abandoned.
There were a handful of stage stops like this along the route but this is the most complete remaining. Others might be some rubble, if anything left at all. The locations show on some maps but there's really nothing left there.
From reading some family history accounts I found online, they ran the standard old west 2 horse stage coach all the way up to some 12 horse teams hauling 2 and 3 wagon trains. Must have been a tough job.
My town isn't even technically 100 years old yet, as it was built at the Snake River bridge site half way between 2 ferry crossings. It was around that time that the local and federal governments began on the irrigation canal network that turned this desert into farm land. So there really isn't much in the way of what we typically think of as old west cowboy stuff unless you get toward Silver City, which boomed in the 1880s. There's a lot of cattle out there now but there really weren't many ranches out there 100 years ago or more. More miners than anything else, probably. This was mostly just desert on the route between Winnemucca and Boise.
There were a handful of stage stops like this along the route but this is the most complete remaining. Others might be some rubble, if anything left at all. The locations show on some maps but there's really nothing left there.
From reading some family history accounts I found online, they ran the standard old west 2 horse stage coach all the way up to some 12 horse teams hauling 2 and 3 wagon trains. Must have been a tough job.
My town isn't even technically 100 years old yet, as it was built at the Snake River bridge site half way between 2 ferry crossings. It was around that time that the local and federal governments began on the irrigation canal network that turned this desert into farm land. So there really isn't much in the way of what we typically think of as old west cowboy stuff unless you get toward Silver City, which boomed in the 1880s. There's a lot of cattle out there now but there really weren't many ranches out there 100 years ago or more. More miners than anything else, probably. This was mostly just desert on the route between Winnemucca and Boise.
