Brief History of the Lake Family
Provided by John C Evanoff
Published author, poet and Reno native

Myron Charles Lake bas born in New York state in 1828. He moved to Honey Lake Valley, California after serving in the Mexican-American War. Realizing the importance of Reno's location, Lake traded some of his land for Charles Fuller's 40 acres near the Truckee River in 1861. Because this was a major route to Virginia City, he built a bridge (shown above) and twelve miles of toll road. It cost a horse and rider ten cents to cross.

Around this time, he met Jane Bryant, who had been born Jane Conkey in New York on June 20, 1837. She had four children with her first husband, John Prince Bryant, but in 1862 John was killed in the Civil War. A penniless widow, Jane decided to move west. Taking her three living children with her, she traveled to California in a wagon train pulled by horses. There she met Myron, a shrewd businessman. After courting for two years, they married on September 25, 1864, the year that Nevada became a state. They named their one child Charlie.

Myron now owned a fairly large ranch house in the Truckee Meadows, a large house in downtown Reno and houses in various other cities in California and Nevada. But for all his business savvy, Lake had problems as a husband and father, and in 1879 to try to save his marriage to Jane, he bought a mansion owned by Washington J. Marsh built in 1877 on the northwest corner of Virginia Street and California Avenue. He never lived in the house but left it to Jane to do whatever she saw fit with whatever funds derived from their divorce, the first divorce of prominence in Nevada. The two story house became one of the preeminent properties in all of Reno.

Myron Lake died in 1884. Jane Lake kept the property up for awhile until she could not handle the expenses whereupon she sold it in 1899 and lived on the proceeds until her death on January 14, 1903 of pneumonia.

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