Memorial service Friday for longtime Nevada historian

A memorial service will be held Friday for Maryellen Vallier Sadovich, a well-known Nevada historian and businesswoman. The service will be at noon at the Palm Mortuary, 800 S. Boulder Highway, Henderson.

Sadovich was author of "The Mysterious Valley," a history of Caliente and the surrounding part of Lincoln County, and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. For four decades she operated the Midway Motel in Caliente.

She sold the property in 2010 and lived in Henderson at the time of her death in July. She was 85.

In 1959, Sadovich and the late Celesta Lowe founded the Southern Nevada Historical Society, according to one of its past presidents, Elizabeth Warren. Active through the mid-1980s, the society successfully fought to have the Old Las Vegas Fort declared a state historic site.

Sadovich also uncovered much of the historical significance that led to establishing Spring Mountain Ranch State Park.

Together Lowe and Sadovich interviewed the last few Southern Nevada pioneers, or their aging children, collected historic documents from them, and deposited many in the Special Collection archives at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where researchers use them regularly.

"Maryellen was a friendly, outgoing person, and she shared her information, so others could do further research building on her own," Warren said.

Sadovich was particularly active in documenting the early history of Henderson, and in 1967 helped found there the institution now known as the Clark County Museum.

Mark Hall Patton, the museum's administrator, said, "She helped bring in the Anna Roberts Park Collection, our first important acquisition."

Park's antiques, ranging from Paiute baskets to cylinder record players to ore samples and mining machinery, established the fledgling museum as a principal repository of the region's historic artifacts.

Sadovich later helped found The Caliente Heritage Boxcar Museum.

"She instigated it and others added to it," said Caliente Mayor Keith Larson. "It preserves the history of the families that originated here."

Because Caliente was founded by a railroad, the museum is literally housed in a boxcar, parked beside the photogenic former railroad station that now serves as City Hall.

Sadovich was noted for careful, almost compulsively detailed research, and in the 1970s published articles in the Review-Journal's history-oriented Sunday magazine, The Nevadan. She also wrote for the Henderson Home News and the Lincoln County Record, and was designated a Nevada state historian by then-Gov. Paul Laxalt.

Sadovich was born Sept. 29, 1926, in Engadine, Mich., the daughter of Edmond and Claire Vallier, dairy farmers.

She was married briefly to Glynn Harris of Shreveport, La. They lived in Tooele, Utah. She moved to Southern Nevada in the early 1950s as the bride of Joseph Sadovich, her second husband and an employee of Henderson's Stauffer Chemical Co.

Sadovich held a bachelor's degree in romantic languages from the University of Utah and a master's in history from UNLV. She achieved an advanced rank in kung fu in her late 40s, and became a registered nurse at 60.

Following the death of Joseph Sadovich, she married John Clark. After Clark's death, she married Earl McWilliams, who survives her.

She is also survived by two daughters, Glenda Harris and Julianna Sadovich Cambell; two sons, Craig Harris and Joseph Sadovich; two brothers, Vincent and Francis, and a sister, Rita McAllister. Brothers Bernard, Lawrence, Wayne, Stanley and Kenneth, and sisters, Jan and Shirley, preceded her in death.