The Tonopah Club: from silver-camp saloon to town institution

The first club in a new mining camp

Tom Kendall and Jack Carey opened the Tonopah Club during the town’s first commercial growth around 1901. A historical account reproduced by the Tonopah Mining Park places it among the saloons, restaurants, lodging houses, and assay offices that followed the silver discovery.

The early club was a lumber building on Main Street. Liquor had to be hauled across the desert from the railroad at Sodaville, and the bar was initially the principal business. Gambling developed alongside that trade rather than arriving as a fully planned casino operation.

Early accounts associate a dealer named Hennessy with stud poker and George Wingfield with stud, draw poker, and faro. Faro was a banking card game, with players wagering against the house. That distinction helps explain why the club’s history soon became concerned with who supplied the money behind the games.

From improvised games to a managed concession

The earliest recollections describe informal, high-risk gambling sessions before the club had a stable arrangement for licensing and backing the games. A customer with substantial cash could put pressure on a poorly financed bank by increasing wagers rapidly.

Wingfield and Carey subsequently organized a gambling concession, giving the gaming side a more deliberate business structure. The 1903 Tonopah charter supplied municipal authority to license and regulate saloons, entertainment premises, and other businesses, although the charter itself is not a surviving license for this particular club.

A 1906 newspaper report refers to a roulette operator who had worked at the Tonopah Club about three years earlier. An early interior photograph also shows roulette and a cashier cage. These sources ground the story in a specific game and a physical operating space, rather than simply in general memories of mining-town gambling.

George Wingfield and the movement of mining money

Wingfield’s association with the Tonopah Club links gambling to the rise of one of Nevada’s most influential mining and banking figures. A Nevada Historical Society account describes him investing winnings in the club’s gambling concession, with faro as a specialty.

The relationship worked in both directions. Mining discoveries and stock transactions brought money into the town; gamblers and dealers could turn their earnings and personal connections toward speculation. The club was one of the places where those worlds met.

George Graham Rice’s memoir later portrayed the club as central to Wingfield’s rise. Rice was himself a mining-stock promoter, so his account is evidence of how the story was remembered and promoted, not an audited statement of the casino’s earnings.

Another remembered episode concerns Charley Taylor, who reportedly tested a roulette system after profiting from a mining transaction. The later account describes a private-room wheel, twelve hours of play, and a loss of $34,000, followed by champagne for the spectators. It is a vivid historical anecdote, but the exact amount and sequence should remain attributed to that account.

A name that outlasted the first boom

Nick Abelman became associated with a later Tonopah Club phase. The specialist casino history distinguishes that period from the original saloon and identifies March 23, 1931, as the date of its first modern Nevada gaming license. A collector index beginning the club’s history in 1913 therefore does not disprove its much earlier origins.

Oral histories describe later operators including Slim Russell, and Bill Perchetti recalled leasing the club from Leroy Russell in the 1960s. John Campbell remembered a partnership involving his father and several other local men during 1958–1960. These recollections identify different phases without supplying a complete chain of ownership percentages and licenses.

The club continued through changes in the town’s economy, including wartime activity associated with the nearby air base. Accounts describe increased demand for gambling and changes in the use of floor space. This later institution should not be pictured as the unchanged wooden saloon of 1901.

A bar, a café, and rooms on several levels

Later accounts describe a long bar, gaming rooms, food service, a cocktail lounge, and upstairs accommodation used by staff and other occupants. A firefighter’s oral history explains that the eventual complex joined three sections: a central gambling hall and flanking buildings that had earlier housed other businesses.

The recollected layout included a basement nightclub, the Pink Elephant Room at ground level, and rooms above. The café changed position within the complex after kitchen fires. These details reveal a building that adapted over time, rather than a single fixed arrangement that can be applied to every decade.

UNLV’s catalog for a later interior photograph identifies the bar across the room, slot machines in the center, and a table-game area near the camera. The photograph provides firmer visual evidence for that particular interior than a generalized image of a frontier saloon.

Campbell’s childhood recollections add a smaller, more personal view: rolling quarters and helping with money bags in the cage. They show the labor behind the public gambling room and the way a locally operated casino could become part of family memory.

How the chips record a changing casino

The club has a substantial surviving collectible record, including table chips, a roulette check, a betting token, order cards, matchbooks, ashtrays, and postcards. Those categories answer different questions. A chip identifies an issue or denomination; an order card can document a production transaction; a postcard preserves a public view of the premises.

Collector records place large-crown one-dollar and roulette pieces in 1943 and describe later issues using several molds and designs. Miner-and-mule imagery connects some of the chips directly to Tonopah’s local identity. Dates attached to those issues should not be mistaken for the founding date of the club.

One particularly useful record is a December 31, 1953, order for 300 black five-dollar Mason hub-mold chips, associated with a 1954 issue. It offers more precise production evidence than a broad decade assigned by a seller. It does not reveal how long every chip remained in use.

A brass token promises a one-dollar wager on twenty-one or craps. Unlike an unspecified trade token, that inscription connects the piece to named gambling activity. Even so, the known objects do not establish a complete opening-era chip rack, and no authenticated 1901–1910 issue is identified in the evidence used here.

The ending was more than a single fire

John Campbell dated the club’s fire to late fall 1974. Another firefighter’s recollection says the department extinguished the blaze and that the most serious damage affected one side of the connected complex. In that account, other sections may have remained salvageable.

The same recollection describes later acquisition by Scott Corporation and demolition for a proposed parking area connected with anticipated MX-missile-program construction. That creates a more careful sequence than simply saying that a fire destroyed the entire casino: closure and fire were followed by decisions about damaged but partly surviving buildings.

These are oral-history accounts, and the exact legal and property sequence remains incompletely documented. They nevertheless explain how the physical club disappeared while photographs, chips, and memories remained. Its significance lies in that long continuity of use: a mining-camp business became a town institution, repeatedly adapting to the people and economy around it.