The history of Tonopah

The post office opened the morning of Pearl Harbor

The Tonopah Main Post Office is a squat, formal brick building that still serves as Tonopah's main post office today. It was the first post office the federal government ever built in this mining town, raised at a site picked out in 1940 after three years of planning in Washington. Builders laid its cornerstone in May 1941, and the town threw a parade to mark it. The design followed a stripped-down, formal style common to federal buildings of that era, with plain columns and clean lines. The building opened its doors on December 7, 1941, the same morning Japanese planes struck Pearl Harbor. Its basement also held other government offices for the town.

Clerks still work the counters installed in 1941

The architect behind the post office, Louis A. Simon, worked for the federal government's Office of the Supervising Architect, turning out standard designs for small-town America. Tonopah's building was one of several copies built across the West, but it remains the only one of its kind in Nevada. Inside, the layout barely changed over the decades. Clerks still work the same counters installed when the building opened.

The building joined the National Register in 1990

In 1990, the Tonopah Main Post Office joined the National Register of Historic Places. The listing recognized it as the last federal post office built in Nevada before World War II changed how the government built things. After 1941, wartime spending shifted toward military projects, and small-town post offices like this one stopped going up in the same style. Tonopah's building stands as a marker of that closing chapter in federal architecture.

Fire in the Belmont Mine killed seventeen miners nearby

The post office still operates on South Mineral Street, handling mail for the town the way it has since Pearl Harbor morning. The building's plain brick face and formal lines look much as they did in 1941.

A short walk from the post office, the ground holds darker memories. Fifty-six people died in Tonopah between January and April 1902, when pneumonia tied to poor sanitation swept through camp. Many were buried in the Old Tonopah Cemetery, not far from where the post office now stands.

Nine years before the post office opened, Tonopah suffered its worst mining disaster. On February 23, 1911, fire broke out more than a thousand feet underground in the Belmont Mine. Seventeen miners died. One of them, William Murphy, made three trips back into the smoke to pull out trapped men before he fell to his death on his last attempt.