Formerly a stop for settlers on their way to California and later a train depot, the town's economy remains based on farming, mining and increasingly on tourism.

Cattle and mules by the hundreds are surrounding us, in grass to their knees, all discoursing sweet music with the grinding of their jaws.”[2] A few settlers stopped there to harvest the wild rye growing in the meadows and scythe the hay each fall, which they sold.

[4] Thereafter he put his mining expertise to work and discovered many valuable lodes in the surrounding area, which contributed to increased railway traffic.

The town's centenary was celebrated in 1968 with a Frontier Days theme suggested by two of the founder's great-great granddaughters, Elaine Pommerening and Pat Rowe, who had recently moved back to Lovelock.

At the southern end of town is the 20-acre reservation of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe, which has recently profited from a change in state law to open a marijuana dispensary there.

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.

[citation needed] Lovelock's heritage buildings include the wooden built Grace Methodist Church on the corner of Cornell Avenue and 8th Street, dating from 1886.

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.

[20] 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.

Even after he moved on, its Indian Cemetery was a point of reference for him to which he often returned in memory: Other poems in which the town's name figures record the impressions of passing travellers.

[25] 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] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[37] 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.

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.

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.