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Willow Creek Park:
Ranchland To Parkland In 40 Years
Article and photos by Hal Swift
Writer for The Nevada Observer
This little old brick building in Sparks sets in the middle of the lawn of a neighborhood park. Children enjoy the park's playground equipment. Mothers prepare picnic lunches to be served on the several plastic tables scattered about the lawn. Fathers lounge about on the comfortable benches, waiting for the announcement that, "Lunch is ready!"
The building's heavy, metal-strapped door, is not much more now than convenient billboard space for passing graffiti vandals. A nearby resident said he believes it was some sort of school building. Once in a while, someone will stare curiously at the old brick structure, wondering what it is--or was, but most don't seem to know, or care.
If you were to ask most any old-timer in the area, however, they could tell you. This is the abattoir, or slaughterhouse, where the Ghiggeri brothers, owners of the ranch that once stood here, processed the cattle they sold to a long gone market, in a long gone era of Western History.
Nowadays, the lonely little building is the only indication that families once lived here, engaged in the hard work of ranching, and then moved on to another life, here... or in the hereafter.
(Ed. note) In the mid to late 1960s Hal Swift and I worked at a radio station that sat in the middle of a pasture, directly across the old two lane Prater Way in Sparks where that park is today. The entire area is covered in homes, businesses, and major thoroughfares today. I have seen deer, bobcat, rabbits, dove, quail and other wild animals, even fed the family on some of those dove, quail, and rabbits, within throwing distance of the radio station control room. As Mr. Swift said, the times they are a changing.
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