In June 1850, Hampton S. Beatie and Abner Blackburn, two Mormons from Salt Lake City, established Nevada’s first trading post a few yards from here along the principal emigrant trail to California’s gold fields, which in the 1850’s passed about 50 yards east. The post was a roofless 20-by-60-foot log structure soon known as Mormon Station. Beatie and Blackburn obtained provisions from Placerville, California, and traded them to emigrants in need who had just crossed the Forty Mile Desert east of Fallon, Nevada, and were about to take on the Sierra Nevadas. In 1851, Col. John Reese, a Salt Lake City businessman, led a wagon train of provisions into Carson Valley and established a larger Mormon Station in what is now Genoa. The present site then became identified as the location of Old Mormon Station.