McGill, NV

McGill is a White Pine County census-designated place in Nevada's Steptoe Valley, about eleven miles north of Ely. Its beginnings were ranch-based: John Cowger established a ranch in 1872, and William Lyons and William McGill acquired it in 1886. The McGill Ranch post office opened in 1891. The big change came when the Steptoe Valley Mining and Smelter Company built a copper reduction plant between 1906 and 1908, processing ore from mines near Ruth and Ely. McGill briefly went by Smelter and grew into a company town around the plant.

At its height in the early 1910s, the smelter drew a large workforce and made McGill one of the valley's busiest places. The plant's shutdown in the 1970s ended that industrial era, but the community remains legible in the valley street grid and the surviving mining-town setting. Today McGill sits within the Ely-centered White Pine County network, with open desert, mountain ranges, and outdoor routes surrounding the former company town. Its story is a sharp Nevada time line: ranch, railroad-linked copper works, industrial population, and a smaller community carrying the memory of the smelter.