When Las Vegas started as a small railroad town in 1905, Armenian farmers, craftsmen, and merchants showed little interest in settling in a place best known for its arid desert, sparse natural resources, and limited trade connections. But over time, Armenians escaping persecution and genocide in their ancestral homeland in the eastern Mediterranean began to settle in Los Angeles, Fresno, and Las Vegas. Though Southern Nevada seemed at first to be an unlikely spot to forge a “new Armenia,” it is now home to 20,000 Armenians.
The promise of cheap land and business opportunities drew the first Armenian families to the Las Vegas Valley about 1911. Most Armenian immigrants to the United States during the early twentieth century had fled the pogroms perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks in 1895 that ravaged many Armenian settlements in eastern Turkey and caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people. A second wave of immigration, generated by even more dire circumstances, followed the lifting of World War I immigration restrictions. In 1915, systematic genocide of the Armenian people living under Ottoman rule began under the orders of the sultan, killing an estimated 1.5 million people out of a population of 2 million. By 1924, almost 100,000 Armenians had settled in the United States. That same year, Armenians were among the 521 students enrolled in classes in Reno at Nevada's then-only university.
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