Dixie Valley, Nevada, was a small ranching town in
Churchill County, Nevada until the area was acquired in 1995 by the
United States Navy
The United States Navy (USN) is the naval warfare, maritime military branch, service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is the world's most powerful navy with the largest Displacement (ship), displacement, at 4.5 millio ...
for the
Fallon Range Training Complex (FRTC).
The town had no retail businesses, most residents were more than a mile from their nearest neighbor, and a 1-room school (grades 1–8) was the teacher's residence and served as a meeting, dance, and election hall (grades 9–12 were bussed 75 miles to
Fallon, Nevada
Fallon is a city in Churchill County, Nevada, Churchill County in the U.S. state of Nevada. The population was 9,327 at time of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Fallon is the county seat of Churchill County and is located in the Lahont ...
). The abandoned town of Dixie was established at the head of Dixie Valley in 1861 and named by Southern sympathizers.
The population was 49 in 1940.
The medium-sized Dixie Valley
geothermal power
Geothermal power is electricity generation, electrical power generated from geothermal energy. Technologies in use include dry steam power stations, flash steam power stations and binary cycle power stations. Geothermal electricity generation i ...
plant (1988, 66 megawatts) employs ~30 people and has 12 production steam wells and ~24
injection well
An injection well is a device that places fluid deep underground into porous rock formations, such as sandstone or limestone, or into or below the shallow soil layer. The fluid may be water, wastewater, brine (salt water), or water mixed with ind ...
s.
1954 earthquakes
A very large
doublet earthquake
__NOTOC__
In seismology, doublet earthquakes – and more generally, multiplet earthquakes – were originally identified as multiple earthquakes with nearly identical waveforms originating from the same location. They are now characterized as dist ...
occurred on December 16, 1954. The
Dixie Valley–Fairview earthquakes occurred four minutes apart, each with a maximum
Mercalli intensity of X (''Extreme''). The initial shock measured 7.3 and the second shock measured 6.9 . Damage to man-made structures was minimal because the region was sparsely populated at the time, but
oblique-slip motion on a normal fault resulted in the appearance of large
fault scarp
A fault scarp is a small step-like offset of the ground surface in which one side of a fault has shifted vertically in relation to the other. The topographic expression of fault scarps results from the differential erosion of rocks of contrastin ...
s.
Education
The
Churchill County School District is the school district of the county. By 1971 the board of trustees opted to close the Dixie Valley school. At the time 10 Dixie Valley students were enrolled in the schools in Fallon.
[ �]
Clipping
at Newspapers.com
Ancestry.com LLC is an American genealogy company based in Lehi, Utah. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical, historical records, and related genetic genealogy websites. It is owned by The ...
.
References
{{Authority control
Ghost towns in Churchill County, Nevada
Ghost towns in Nevada
1861 establishments in Nevada Territory