Hawthorne Model Home Early 1900s

The building in this photo is one of a hundred, one room cabins still existing in Hawthorne, Nevada in one form or another. Today this town site offers a walk through history as one sees building materials such as large virgin pines planks to ammo boxes from the 4,500 bunker munitions depot. There are 1,465 households in Hawthorne today.

The origins of Hawthorne lie NOT in mining or agriculture, like so many of Nevada’s other towns, but in the railroad. In 1880, the Carson and Colorado Railroad was being built from Mound House down to the Owens Valley in California. The Carson and Colorado was meant to replace the wagon roads that crisscrossed the area and make it easier to haul ore out of all the small mining towns that had been springing up along the Nevada-California border. Several of these wagon roads intersected at the south end of Walker Lake, so it was decided this would be a good place to build a division and distribution point for the railroad. Legend has it that the work crews building the railroad turned their pack mules loose to fend for themselves during the winter of 1880-81, and when they returned the next spring they found that the herd had settled itself into the most sheltered part of the valley to survive the cold winter. If it was good enough for the mules it was good enough for the humans, so the town site of Hawthorne was laid out on the same spot.

Through these years, though, the population of the town never rose above a few hundred. The Carson and Colorado Railroad was sold to Southern Pacific in 1900, and the rail line was rerouted away from the town. The town survived by being a supply center for all of the small mining operations in the area, but Hawthorne was always in danger of shriveling up and blowing off the map.

Until the 1920s, that is. Because in 1926 a disaster happened on the opposite side of the country that would forever alter the destiny of the town. That was the year that the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot in Lake Denmark, New Jersey exploded, killing 21 people and sending raining shrapnel into the surrounding communities. After this disaster, the Navy decided that maybe the middle of a heavily populated area wasn’t the best place to stockpile all of their ammunition, so they set off in search of a more desolate location in the vast expanses of the West. The place they finally chose was tiny little Hawthorne, and in 1930 the first shipment of high explosives arrived at the new Hawthorne Naval Ammunition Depot. After that Hawthorne became a military town, and its entire reason for existence shifted to supporting the Depot. At the height of World War II over 5,000 people were employed at the Depot, supplying munitions for the entire American war effort. The population of the town itself topped out at 13,000 (today 3,000). The years since World War II have seen a decline in the importance of the Hawthorne Depot, but even after all these years it is still in operation.

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