Hidden in the remote Mosquito Valley of northern Washoe County, Diessner was never much of a town, but for a brief period in the early twentieth century, during the Dry Farming Movement and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, it served as the center of a small and remarkably isolated ranching community. Established around the homestead of Austrian immigrant Oskar (Oscar) George Diessner in 1916, the settlement eventually included a school, a post office, and a substantial dairy ranch. At its height, only about two dozen people lived there, scattered among the surrounding ranches and open range. The Diessner Post Office operated from 1923 until 1933, and the little community survived as a recognizable locality into the early 1940s. After the Diessner family sold their ranch in 1941, the name gradually disappeared from the landscape, replaced on later maps by Drown Ranch. Today, little remains at the site, but Diessner provides a fascinating glimpse into the short-lived ranching settlements that once dotted the remote valleys of northern Nevada.
1916 Oscar George Diessner establishes his homestead in Mosquito Valley.
1916 Oscar marries Filomena "Minnie" Illichmann in Oakland.
1917 Oscar registers for draft as farmer
1921 Oscar files Federal Land Patent on ranch
1923 Diessner Post Office established, February 13. Reno postal officials can't find it.
1924 Federal Biological Survey material documents pronghorn being raised on a ranch near Diessner.
1927 Nevada Educational Directory lists Mosquito Valley school at Diessner with teacher Ellie Hunt.
1933 Diessner Post Office discontinued, October 31.
1941 Oscar and Minnie sell their ranch and move to California
1941 Oscar registers for draft, working at Monarch Iron Works in San Francisco
1948 Maps begin to show Drown Ranch
1975 Oscar passes away in Moutain View, California
It was noted that local ranchers were advised to go with the good stuff and not just any ol' cow.
PUREBRED STOCK IS SENT VYA RANCHERS
Oscar Deissner and Allen Norton Take County Agent's Advice for Herds
During the visit last July of S. E. Merrill, Washoe county agent, Miss Hazel Zimmerman, home demonstrator, and Miss Gertrude Airth, public health nurse, to Vya, in the northern part of the county, Mr. Merrill told the farmers the advantage of building up their dairy and beef herds with purebred stock. The advice resulted this week in the shipping of a registered Holstein bull calf from the dairy herd of E. L. Hall to Oscar Diessner of Vya, and the shipment today to Allen P. Norton, another progressive farmer of that district, of a purebred Hereford bull from the university stock farm. "These farmers are on the right track," said Mr. Merrill yesterday. "They realize that it costs no more, or even less, to raise highgrade stock than it does to raise scrubs, and that it pays much better."
-Nevada State Journal, October 29, 1921
After the post office-- among other things-- burned at nearby Beulah, Diessner got its own post office to briefly serve the ranch community. But first, there was a slight delay.
NEW POSTOFFICE CAN'T BE FOUND
Washoe county has a new postoffice but the local postal authorities don't know where to find it. Consequently, any mail consigned to "Diessner" must be pigeon-holed pending the receipt of further advices.
A fourth class postoffice has been created at "Diessner" (wherever that is), according to information received at the Reno postoffice from Washington today. The communication contains instructions relating to supplies for the new office but that is as far as it goes.
-Reno Evening Gazette, March 26, 1923
Oh, there it is!
NEW POSTOFFICE FINALLY LOCATED
While attaches of the Reno postoffice were carefully scrutinizing the map today in an effort to find the hamlet of Diessner, Washoe county, where the latest Nevada postoffice has been established, the daily postal bulletin, received from Washington this morning, disclosed the place. It is twenty-one miles north of Vya and will be the farthermost north of any postoffice in the county. Diessner is six miles south of the Oregon line. It will be linked to the postal system by stage operating out of Vya. Postal officials here were puzzled yesterday when they were notified in a communication from the department that a fourth class postoffice had been created at Diessner, for they had never heard of the place.
-Reno Evening Gazette, March 27, 1923
Don't know where they got the "Paul" from. Anyway, this was a large dairy operation, considering where it was located.
FARTHEST NORTH FARMER OF WASHOE COUNTY SHIPS CREAM 238 MILES TO RENO
The fathest north farmer of Washoe county ships cream produced by his herd of 12 dairy cows to Reno, 238 miles away, and makes money.
He is Paul [sic] Diessner, owner of the Diessner ranch in the Mesquite valley, six miles from the Oregon line.
The cream, sent twice weekly, is carried over three stage lines and two railroads in its long journey to the Nevada Packing company.
It is put on the Vya stage at the Diessner ranch, taken from Vya to Cedarville, thence to Alturas by stage, and transferred over the N. C. O. railroad to Wendel, from whence the Southern Pacific finishes the journey to Reno.
According to John Blum, general manager of the Nevada Packing company, Reno is the cream center for scores of distant California and Nevada towns, Metropolis, in the east, near Elko, sending shipments a distance of 364 miles.
-Nevada State Journal, March 23, 1924
The Diessner dairy farm was substantial. Oscar's daughter Bertha's 202 obituary mentions
...the family operated a 1,500-acre dairy farm in Washoe County, and that the family kept approximately 60 cows. Bertha recalled beginning to help milk cows when she was only four and a half years old and operating and cleaning the family's hand cream separator.
- Bertha
Anna Ruth Cochran Obituary, Mar 4, 2020
The ranches around Diessner formed part of the small but important ranching community of Mosquito Valley. Among them was the Wood Ranch, owned by O. C. Wood, a U.S. Biological Survey employee who was also engaged in predatory-animal control. In 1924 the ranch became the temporary home of young pronghorn captured on the newly established Washoe State Game Refuge. A five-acre fenced meadow was constructed there, where the fawns were cared for and raised before being shipped to parks and wildlife preserves elsewhere in the West. Ranchers were not merely bystanders in these early conservation efforts. Wood took part directly in the work, while True Hapgood of Last Chance Ranch joined Biological Survey personnel in locating newborn antelope. The federal government also recognized that successful refuges in northern Nevada required the cooperation of the local stockmen, whose knowledge of the range and herds was valuable to the program.
More food for the herd of 40 healthy, rapidly growing antelope in the five-acre corral at Diessner in northern Washoe county, was taken yesterday by E. R. Sans, head of the United States biological survey in Nevada. One thousand pounds of bran was taken by Sans in his truck, making the second load of foodstuffs for the young kids in a month.
-Nevada State Journal, June 26, 1924
When a sufficient number of fawns were caught to make a load they were placed in an automobile and taken to the Wood ranch at Diessner, Nov., where we had built a wire-fenced inclosure [sic] containing 5 acres of meadowland. The distance by road was about 55 miles, but going by saddle horse it was only 12 miles. It was much easier on the fawns to go in a car, even a much greater distance, than it would have been on pack horses for a shorter distance. In building temporary inclosures [sic] to hold antelope fawns until they are old enough to transfer to their permanent homes much care should be taken to have all posts on the outside of the wire netting and all braces so placed that there will be no projections inside for the fawns to run against. The feeding corral should be small and made of dressed lumber with no cracks, or if net wire is used it should be lined inside with sacking to keep the animals from getting hurt when they become frightened.
-UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE DEPARTMENT BULLETIN No. L346, August 1925