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Virginia City,NV - Storey County - Jan. 13, 1866 - Theall & Company Memorandum :

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Documents Start Price:350.00 USD Estimated At:700.00 - 1,500.00 USD
Virginia City,NV - Storey County - Jan. 13, 1866 - Theall & Company Memorandum :
Duplicate for silver and gold bullion deposited from the Savage Mine (Pacific Mill) for assay. $29.09. This memorandum is from early in the Comstock era. Header in blue with fancy titling. Towne & Bacon, Printers, San Francisco. 12" x 5.25". Theall & Company were classic Comstock era assayers, who branched out to many of the Nevada silver mining camps as news of their discoveries were announced to the public.

H. W. Theall, born in New York in 1827, bought E. Justh’s assaying business in Marysville in 1859. At the time, his competition was the well known gold rush assaying firm of Harris & Marchand, who later sold out to David Knight in 1863. Theall may have investigated the mining rushes at Unionville in 1861, Aurora in 1861-2, and Reese River in 1863. His contemporaries in Marysville certainly did, as Knight went from silver camp to silver camp, establishing assay offices in some, and working in others. Regardless, Theall had set up an assaying business in Virginia City, Nevada Territory by late 1862 or early 1863 at the corner of C and Taylor streets, right in the center of town. About this time, Theall may have opened a satellite assay office in Austin, the center of the then booming silver camps of the Reese River Region. During this booming period of the early 1860’s, Theall lived in Virginia City, while his Marysville office was leased or managed by another person. His Austin office was later managed by A. Soderling, a well known assayer in Nevada mining camps, who later worked in such places as Bodie and Treasure Hill.

Theall’s business was so important to the financial infrastructure of the Comstock and Austin, that he took on as partners the bankers Paxton & Thornburgh, who were the major bankers in Austin and to a much lesser degree on the Comstock. When the White Pine rush attracted thousands of miners and businessmen to this remote eastern Nevada mining region in 1868, Theall was among them. He set up an assay office there, but sadly perished in May of 1869 from an unknown illness at the age of 42.