Hugh Gallagher

Hugh Gallagher was born in Virginia City in 1920 to a family who lived on the Comstock for three generations. He attended the University of Nevada and worked as an educator in Storey County, eventually becoming the superintendent for the Storey County School District in 1955. Gallagher was interviewed Lucy Scheid in 1984.

Surprisingly, the Comstock was a very good mining camp in the 1930s. Gold and silver mining is a good Depression industry. Mining on the Comstock had a revival at that particular time. In the 1920s, the Comstock was down, about as low as it ever was outside of 1942-1946 when all mining was shut down. But in 1930, the Union Mine was running, Con-Virginia was running, the Hale & Norcross, the Keystone, the New York, the Woodville, the Overland, just a lot of mines were operating on the Comstock. Not in the big way that they were going in the 1870s and 1880s, but they were working, and it wasn't all that bad a price for gold and silver at the time. The Comstock was a good mining camp in the 1930s. So everyone was connected with the mining industry; they had no tourism at that time, of course. Everything in the 1930s was derived from mining.
When Roosevelt became President of the United States, we went off the gold standard, and where gold had been at $20.00 an ounce, then it went up to $35.00, and that’s going to revive the mining camp. The Comstock runs about twenty parts silver to one part gold. The critical thing is silver, and silver didn't make that type of jump, but it does go along a little bit with the price of gold. If gold goes up, silver has a tendency to go up along with it. If gold goes down, then you get a tendency to come down in silver. Silver did go up a little bit, and the good price of gold made it all worthwhile.