Down a dirt road in Dayton, not far from an elementary school and a housing development, is a piece of Nevada history.  Work on the Sutro Tunnel started in 1869.

"It finished in 1878 and it was Adolf Sutro's vision to build a tunnel from Dayton to Virginia City to drain the mines of the excessive hot water and ventilate the mines," said Pamela Abercrombie with the group Friends of Sutro Tunnel. "They wanted to use it to transport ore - and they did use it for that - but that was not the main purpose of the tunnel."

A town sprang up around the site.

"The town was to the East," Abercrombie said.   "Adolf Sutro envisioned a self-contained site where his miners would be able to live.  They had agriculture out here that the water helped irrigate.  Still here is a warehouse, a machine shop, a mule barn and the wood shop.  These are the original buildings that are still here; there were about ten other buildings that are no longer here."

There have been multiple cave-ins in the tunnel itself over the years and the site is closed to the public.

"It used to drain 3.5 to four million gallons a day," Abercrombie said.   "Now its a million gallons a day and it's not safe, it's caved in.  We don't know how many cave-ins are back there. Sometimes you hear rumbles when you are back there.  It is the focal point of the site but it's not safe."

Over the past year, volunteers with Friends of Sutro Tunnel have been cleaning up the property and fixing up some of the buildings.

"The whole point of Friends of Sutro Tunnel is to preserve and save the historic Sutro Tunnel site so we can eventually get it open to the public," Abercrombie said.  "We're bringing together business partners, contractors and historians to find a way to restore it so we can get public access.  It has been hidden for so many years and it's a coveted site."

A fundraising campaign is underway but the process will be a lengthy one.

"The portal will take millions of dollars, so that one is on the way back burner," Abercrombie said.   "In the meantime, in order to do everything right, preservation is not cheap, preservation takes a lot of money, it takes expertise  and getting certain things done the right way."

The group has set up a website chronicling the history of the site and current restoration efforts: https://thesutrotunnel.org/