J. A. Nelson built Leviathan Hall in 1863 with a special view to the development of muscular talent, and although it was torn down just five years later in 1868, its 28-foot-wide and 100-foot-long building dominated Wallace Street. On January 2, 1865, saloon owner Con Orem, a 29-year-old son of an Ohio blacksmith and veteran prizefighter, fought Hugh O'Neil, a 34-year-old Ireland native, miner, and whiskey-drinking barroom brawler, before a crowd that had paid ten dollars for reserved seats or five for pit seats; after Round 185, O'Neil knocked down Orem and Nelson, serving as referee, called the bout a draw, to the dismay of those in attendance. Later in 1865, the hall became a storage vault for flour after snow closed all transportation routes to Virginia City and sharply limited store and household supplies. As winter continued and flour supplies fell, anxiety and prices rose, and by March 1865 flour cost $1.50 per pound in Virginia City, more than twenty times the price elsewhere in the country. With passes and roads still blocked in spring, Sheriff Neil Howie and the Vigilance Committee oversaw the first organized flour riot, in which 438 people entered Virginia City residences and confiscated flour, including searches of Colonel Wilbur Fisk Sanders' home and Mary Sheehan's home, where her mother successfully hid flour beneath beans. Over eighty sacks of flour were collected, stored in Leviathan Hall, and later redistributed to town residents. The present-day log house was built by Julius Kohl about 1815, and Aunt Julia Elledge, daughter of Virginia City pioneer Lucien Romey, lived there from the 1920s to 1950's.