It’s been nearly 120 years since the creation of the Newlands Project led to the settlement of the Lahontan Valley. A new display at the Churchill County Museum brings that history to life.
The museum recently opened its new Newlands Project, which highlights the history of the country’s first federal reclamation project created to allow irrigation of arid desert land in Lyon and Churchill counties.
The project was originally called the Truckee Project, then the Truckee-Carson Project. Today called it’s called the Newlands Project after Nevada Senator Francis Newlands who helped pass the Newlands Reclamation Act, which created the Bureau of Reclamation, opening up the barren areas of the west to settlement.
The new exhibit replaces the old one that was set up in 1998. It is a hands-on experience with two touch tables, along with a TV screen showing a time lapse video of the construction of the fish streams at Derby Dam, which allow cutthroat trout to swim upstream to spawn.
The first touch table is an interactive map, where the user moves their finger across the table to follow the Truckee River from Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee Canal from Derby Dam to where it merges with the Carson River at Lahontan Reservoir.
The other table details the different types of fish found in Pyramid Lake and various facts about them, complete with images of fish swimming in water.
“There is so much on the Newlands Project that it’s difficult to decide what to include and what to leave out, so we decided to look more to the technology aspect,” Rae Sottile, Museum Curator said.
Other information included in the display details the history of the project, Derby Dam, the Truckee Canal, Lahontan Dam, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s purchase of the Tahoe Dam in 1915 to control the flow of water into the Newlands Project.
It is the museum’s second major long-term exhibit, along with the Hidden Cave Virtual Reality Tours. The display was finished in 2020 and opened to the public this month.
“We’re real excited to have this open and we’d love for folks to come down and look at it,” Sottile said.
Many of the historic photos were provided to the museum by TCID and other collectors, through donations and a couple were borrowed from the Library of Congress, as well as some taken by Museum staff. Visitors can look at displays, watch videos and read information, including letters from prospective early Newlands Project settlers asking about the land and farming opportunities, and the responses from hat was then called the U.S. Reclamation Service.
“We have folders full of such inquiries,” Sottile said.
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