KVIG Informative

Las Vegas did not grow into a city and get a street grid afterward. A railroad subsidiary drew the grid first, then sold the city into existence at a two-day tent auction in May 1905 — and the lines it drew that week still mark where downtown Las Vegas begins.

William Clark, a U.S. senator from Montana, bought the 1,800-acre Stewart Ranch from Helen J. Stewart in 1902, and his San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad completed its line through the property in January 1905, according to a historical marker at the site documenting the event. The railroad formed the Las Vegas Land and Water Company to sell off the surrounding townsite and build the settlement’s water system, according to a UNLV Libraries Special Collections biographical record on the company’s local representative, Walter R. Bracken, who served as the company’s vice president. C.O. Whittemore served as the company’s president, according to the same historical marker.

The Las Vegas Land and Water Company filed a plat subdividing the townsite on May 8, 1905, a week before any lots went on sale, according to a map of that plat held by UNLV Libraries Special Collections. A separate historical marker at the auction site, erected in 1980 by the Las Vegas Diamond Jubilee Committee, identifies the company and the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad as the parties that carried out the sale that followed.

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The Las Vegas Land and Water Company opened the sale on May 15, 1905, auctioning 1,200 lots in what the company platted as Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite from a canvas tent near the rail depot, with auctioneer Ben E. Rhoades conducting the sale before a crowd of more than 1,000 people, according to the historical marker documenting the event. Lots fronting Fremont Street drew some of the auction’s highest bids, with three southeast corner lots there selling for $1,750 each, the marker states.

Standard residential and inside lots sold for $100 to $500, and corner lots elsewhere in the townsite brought as much as $750, according to the marker. By the end of the first day, 176 lots had sold for roughly $79,566, and the full two-day auction brought in about $265,000 — covering only around half of the 1,200 lots the company had platted, the marker shows.

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Fremont Street, among the lots the company platted and sold that week, still runs through the center of downtown Las Vegas today, carrying the same name it was given on paper before the city had a single paying resident. The grid the Las Vegas Land and Water Company drew to move its merchandise has outlasted the company, the railroad that owned it, and every owner who has since tried to redevelop the blocks inside it.

A railroad subsidiary that existed to sell land, not govern it, drew the boundaries Las Vegas still operates inside of today. A hundred and twenty-one years after a two-day tent auction raised about $265,000 on roughly half of 1,200 platted lots, the city that grew out of it is still negotiating, block by block, inside lines a private company set down before anyone had moved in.