Visitors can relive the luxury of boom days in a modern setting while exploring local mines, museums and ghost towns, Cline said. The goal is to create a bustling new community in the high-desert that stays true to its historical roots - representing a new American West that is emerging from the old. They also plan to open a small casino next to the Mizpah, to be called The Mizpah Club. With renovating the Mizpah, which had been shuttered for more than a decade, the Clines have built a new microbrewery in town and this summer plan to start converting the 19th-century Belvada building across the street into hotel, retail and apartment spaces.

So the family has embarked on a plan to breathe new civic and financial life into a town that many Las Vegans write off as a mere gas-and-bathroom stop on the daylong drive to Reno. He later earned his fortune ($26 million in today’s dollars) after staking a claim in one of the area’s most prosperous silver mines.īut for 58-year-old Cline, becoming the absentee owner of the Mizpah isn’t enough of a footprint in the central Nevada region her ancestors helped settle. And her great uncle, Harry Ramsey, one of Tonopah’s first settlers, owned the first saloon in town, a crude affair with a tarp roof not far from where the Mizpah now sits. The Clines bought the hotel five years ago, when many of the community’s 2,500 residents might have considered them newcomers, but Nancy Cline’s family roots here date back more than a century, when the twin frontier towns of Goldfield and Tonopah were the bustling center of the state’s epic gold and silver boom.Ĭline’s grandmother, Emma Ramsey, was once the postmaster of Goldfield. I feel the escape every time I go there.” “Really, it’s a respite from an incredibly brutal, technological, fast-paced world. “This is the one we love the most,” she said of the fabled five-story inn, which in its heyday was the state’s tallest building.

The successful California vintner, who founded the Sonoma-based Cline Cellars winery with her husband, Fred, runs a rich harvest of other business interests nationwide, but none is more special than the Mizpah, which opened in 1907. Not to mention accomplishment, pride and even a sense of belonging. TONOPAH - Each time she walks into the exquisitely preserved lobby of the Mizpah Hotel in this old mining town, Nancy Cline feels a tremendous sense of peace. Randi Lynn Beach/Las Vegas Review-Journal Cline and her husband Fred Cline, owners of Cline Cellars winery in Sonoma, Calif., restored and own the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nev. Nancy Cline poses at the Jacuzzi Family Vineyards in Sonoma, Calif.

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