RENO  , a

city and the county-seat of Washoe county, Nevada, U.S.A., in the W. part of the state, on the Truckee river, and about 244 M . E. of San Francisco . Pop . (1890) 3563; (1900) 4500 (915 foreign-born); (1910 census) 10,867 . It is served by the Southern Pacific, the Virginia & Truckee and the Nevada-California-Oregon railways . The city lies near the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 4484 ft. above the sea, and is in the most humid district of a state which has little rainfall . Among the public institutions are the university of Nevada (see NEVADA), a United States Agricultural Experiment Station, a public library (1903), the Nevada Hospital for Mental Diseases (1882), the City and County Hospital and the People's Hospital . At Reno are railway shops (of the Nevada-California-Oregon railway) and reduction works, and the manufactures include flour, foundry and machine-shop products, lumber, beer, plaster and packed meats . Farming and stock-raising are carried on extensively in the vicinity . On the site of the present city a road house was erected in 1859 for the accommodation of travellers and freight teams on their way to and from California . By 1863 this place had become known as Lake's Crossing, and five years latei it was chosen as a site for a station by the Central (now the Southern) Pacific railway, then building through the Truckee Valley . The new station was then named Reno, in honour of Gen .

Jesse Lee Reno 0823–1862), a Federal officer during the Civil War, who was commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers in November 1861 and major-general of volunteers in July 1862, and led the Ninth Corps at South Mountain, where he was killed . The city twice suffered from destructive fires, in 1873 and 1879 . Reno was incorporated as a town in 1879 and chartered as a city in 1899 . Its city charter was withdrawn in 19o1, but it was rechartered in 1903 .