Lovelock, Nevada

According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Lovelock has a cold desert climate, abbreviated "BWk" on climate maps. The hottest temperature recorded in Lovelock was 112 °F (44 °C) on July 5, 2007, while the coldest temperature recorded was −38 °F (−39 °C) on January 25, 1949.[12]

Pershing County Court House in Lovelock

Among the tourist events figure the I.D.E.S. Portuguese festival in May and what became the annual Frontier Days weekend in July. There are also hot air balloon races (Lovers Aloft, inaugurated in February 2004) and the Lovelock Street Fever car show, begun in June 2007. A major draw is the Lovers Lock Plaza in the shaded area at the back of the Court House where couples symbolise their love by attaching a padlock to an 'endless chain', a practice begun on Valentine's Day, 2005.[16] The following year saw the construction of a dirt-racing track known as the Lovelock Speedway.[17]

Lovelock's heritage buildings include the wooden built Grace Methodist Church on the corner of Cornell Avenue and 8th Street, dating from 1886. It was destroyed by fire in 1922 and the tower was rebuilt without the original spire; in 1983 the church was badly damaged by another fire and was restored again. Marzen House Museum is another Victorian building, built in 1874. The Italianate farmhouse was transported from Big Meadow Ranch in the 1980s and has on its site an assay office, farm machinery sheds, and buildings housing vintage automobiles, while inside it contains 1800s furnishings and a museum, shedding light on the area's history.[18]

The Longhorn Bar beside the tracks on West Broadway is one of the few remaining commercial buildings in typical Nevada style. Not far away is the railroad depot dating from 1880. In 1999 it was presented to the town by the Union Pacific Railroad to be restored and moved to another lot for use as an eatery. This was registered as a historic building in 2004.[19]

The Pershing County Courthouse was built in 1919. Pershing County officials approached Frederic Joseph DeLongchamps, by then the architect of six Nevada courthouses, and asked for a design that would be low in price but distinctive in appearance. As a solution, DeLongchamps designed a round courthouse, patterning it after Thomas Jefferson's library at the University of Virginia campus. The circle-over-hexagon design includes a circular interior hallway and a round courtroom decorated with Corinthian pilasters. A broad, sweeping concrete staircase leads to the main floor of the Beaux-Arts classical structure. Its entrance includes a pedimented portico supported by six Ionic columns. Doric pilasters separate the main story windows. Cream-colored brick and terracotta finish the exterior. A shallow dome crowns the roof and provides the courtroom with a dramatic, soaring ceiling.'[20]

Lovelock, with a population never much more than 2000, will generally be noticed only as a town passed on the way to somewhere else. Thus the debut album of the folk-rock band Center Divide, Lovelock to Winnemucca (1999), takes its title from a desert section of the I-80 highway and the opening track, simply titled “Lovelock”, takes its inspiration from the passing landscape.[21] On the other hand, an interrupted journey is the subject of the Hot Buttered Rum string band's "Limbo in Lovelock" (Live in the Northeast 2007), where a motor breakdown leads to an enforced stop in the town and a visit to the local eatery, the Cowpoke Café.[22][23]

Lovelock has had a poet of its own in Adrian C. Louis, who was brought up on the small reservation for the Lovelock Paiute Indians there. Even after he moved on, its Indian Cemetery was a point of reference for him to which he often returned in memory:

I'm at that place I grew up to leave.

Alkali-crusted sand waves have drifted against my markers of blood.[24]

Other poems in which the town's name figures record the impressions of passing travellers. They include Shaun T Griffin's broadside, "Rain outside Lovelock, late March”[25] and two titles in the work of Kirk Robertson. "Lovelock to Twin Falls" dwells on abandoned shacks in the desert while “Monday Night, Lovelock” focuses on houses there surrounded by junk.[26]

Stephen Bly's Wild West novel Dangerous Ride Across Humboldt Flats (Crossway Press, 2003) deals with the area along the river before the town was built. In the opening chapters, an orphaned Pony Express rider comes across Trent Lovelock and his family on Humboldt Flats in 1860 and is befriended by them.[27] The author has acknowledged that he had the town's later founder in mind in his fictitious Trent Lovelock.[28]

Another novel, Lovelock, Nevada: an explanation (Booklocker, 2010) by Leslie Hale Roberts, plays another variation on the transient theme, starting with a breakdown in the desert.[29] And a stopover in the town was the subject of Fred Leebron's prize-winning short story “Lovelock”, later adapted into his novel Out West (Doubleday 1996). There an ex-convict staying overnight at a motel picks up a retarded woman and guiltily sees her and her sister off in their car the next morning.[30]

Lovelock's connection with the figurative arts has most often been the result of artists passing through the area and recording something that had caught their eye. One of the earliest such travellers was Thomas Moran, who caught the train south along the recently completed Central Pacific line in 1876 and sketched a thunderstorm over the nearby Humboldt Plain.[31][32]

For later artists their local work was the result of travelling the country to create a series on a chosen theme. They have included a watercolor in Bethany Lee's 2016 landscapes with a focus on their vegetation,[33] a view in Jessica Joy Jirsa's road sign series from 2018,[34] and a casino restaurant in Jody Litton's continuing series recording the vernacular architecture of California and adjoining states.[35] The landscape photographer John Pfahl also stopped by the town in 1978 to create two works: a shot of the "Lovelock Seed Co." at its southern end[36] and "Lovelock gas station" at the north end.[37]

Other painters were commissioned to create works in the town. Ejnar Hansen was invited by the Federal Art Project to paint a mural in the newly completed post-office building in 1940 and chose the discovery of the Comstock Lode as a local subject.[38] In 1944 the gaming artist Franz Trevors (1907–80) was commissioned to paint six large canvases on Western subjects by a member of the local gambling industry and these were later installed in the casino at Felix's Bank Club on Main Street. For the main part the paintings were based on subjects by Charles Marion Russell but with original details of the artist's own.[39]

Some artists have also chosen to live in Lovelock for a while. Among these was Buck Nimy (1906/11 – 1959), who made black and white drawings of cowboy subjects, some featuring local scenery after he settled in the town about 1940.[40] More recently there has been Maggie Remington, whose speciality is to dig her own pigments from the desert earth to create her abstract designs.[41] Also living there is Don Bridges, who was commissioned to create a memorial for the Emigrant Trail across the Forty-Mile Desert in 2016. Featuring steel reliefs of three oxen and a wagon, it was installed at the 105 freeway exit south of Lovelock, where it was also visible from trains passing nearby.[42]