Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020 | 7:33 p.m.
ELKO — A non-profit historic preservation group has recently added several northern Nevada projects to its portfolio, including a Basque hotel in Elko and a hotel-casino in Wells.
“We started out of Las Vegas with just me in my back bedroom at a desk,” said Heidi Swank, executive director of Nevada Preservation Foundation, which she created in 2013.
“One day I decided I was a nonprofit. Now we have four staff in Vegas and our new intern, Shaela Zaga, with Great Basin College," she told the Elko Daily Free Press.
Swank said the group helps people decide what they would like to do with their historic buildings and find the path to get there.
“We give advice and do fundraising (around projects),” Swank said, mentioning a project in Virginia City restoring St. Paul the Prospector church. “When they came to us they had two federal grants. We are administering those grants and we got them an additional grant."
“We are launching a fundraising campaign this fall. In total this will be about $1 million for this one restoration of St. Paul the Prospector," she said. "We think of ourselves as ‘the old building troubleshooters.’”
Besides historic preservation, the nonprofit also works to promote tourism in Nevada communities.
Zaga, who plans to graduate from Great Basin College in 2021 and hopes to teach history in the region, is a third-generation Elko resident of Basque ancestry. She also works at The Star Hotel and is creating live tours of the upper level of the building, which was a traditional Basque boarding house. She said her great-grandmother was born upstairs.
Zaga hopes to be able to hold the tours in December. Through Nevada Preservation Foundation she also is documenting homes in Elko to create a concise source of local information.
“I’ve created a little map of the homes I have been logging," she said. “It’s a big project and I am still learning how to figure out the different architecture and materials used and styles.”
Swank said it’s the sort of information that must be gathered before a neighborhood could be designated an historic district.
Zaga said eventually the organization may want to put together historical home tours.
Besides Elko, Swank and other members of the foundation are working on other projects in northeastern Nevada, including a building in Battle Mountain and the El Rancho Hotel and Casino in Wells.
According to the foundation’s website, The El Rancho is located in the heart of what historians define as “Nevada’s Northeastern Frontier.” The building survived a 6.0 earthquake in 2008. It remains one of the last historic hotel-casino buildings in the community.
The hotel was built in 1949 by Italian immigrant and entrepreneur Leo Quilici. It was the first hotel in Wells to utilize structural steel construction and electricity. Ranching and railroad work in the region brought workers into Wells on weekends, and the El Rancho was a popular destination for gatherings.
“We are getting the El Rancho on the National Register of Historic Places,” Swank said. “It is so lovely to see it come back. We have also been providing the city with advice on sourcing materials and what should be kept, what can be let go. The big thing there is we needed to remove the portico off the front of the building in order to get on the National Register.”
