Unionville, Nevada

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Unionville is a small hamlet in Pershing County, Nevada, with the most recent population estimate being approximately 20 people. The town's best years were during the 1870s, when it was an active mining and prospecting town serving the surrounding hilly region. For a brief time, Samuel Longhorn Clemens lived there and prospected, but left without having had much success. Currently, the hamlet consists of a single business - a tourist inn - and a few small houses clustered along or near the gravel roadway which permits access and egress. The nearest paved road, an extension of this gravel road, is about 7 miles to the east, and the nearest services of any sort other than those available at the inn are approximately one hour's drive. There is no formal government as such in the hamlet, which is unincorporated. Some abandoned buildings such as Twain's cabin and a one-room schoolhouse remain standing in various stages of disrepair, but there is no ongoing, active effort to preserve any of these and Unionville is frequently referred to as a ghost town. Just north of the city limits is a cemetery, which may still be occasionally in use. A few hundred yards further into the county, at the splitting of the main road and a side artery, aerial photographs reveal, is a large cemented foundation on which two large buildings and two or three smaller buildings of relatively recent vintage stand: whether these are in use and what they are or were is not identified in any reference source.