The oldest part of the building was a trading post on the Reno-Quincy Road.

In 1887, Bill Crowe of Quincy added a two story hotel with ten rooms.

The wooden building was faced with brick in 1945.

Today (April 2013) Twenty Mile House is a venue for weddings.

Twenty Mile House is located twenty miles west of Beckwourth and twenty miles east of Quincy. It served as a trading post for local gold miners and a stopping place for teamsters on the Reno-Quincy run.

Twenty Mile House soon went from just a stagecoach stop between settlements, to the center of Cromberg, with a trading post, a hotel and a school house. The stages that traveled this route changed their horses at Twenty Mile House.

In the 1880s, teamsters used eight or ten horses to pull their stagecoaches and needed bells to warn on-coming travelers. The stage drivers were the most popular men of their day, jolly and talkative. Miners lived along the river and would trade gold nuggets for grub or tobacco.

Reno was the nearest train depot. Stage coaches hauled travelers from Reno to Twenty Mile House in three days.

Twenty Mile House was originally built on a hillside but was moved after just a few years to the bottom of the hill on large log rollers.

Source: Twenty Mile House website

Buildings that Moved

It's not just that the people of the American West are restless, the buildings themselves sometimes pack up and move when - for one reason or another - the neighborhood no longer suits them or the neighbors no longer want them or opportunity waits down the road.

And when buildings remain in place, they are often searching for their identities.

Of the buildings and structures we have visited, the original Reno Arch holds the record for number of moves. It has been moved five times since it was built in 1926.

Jax Truckee Diner holds the distance title. The building moved from New Jersry to Pennsylvanis in 1948, then from Pennsylvania to Califonia in 1992.

Probably the most ambitious relocation occurred on July 4th 1904, when the Southern Pacific Railroad loaded most of the town of Wadsworth, Nevada, onto rail cars and transported the town thirty miles west to create a new town which became known as Sparks.