Lovelock owes its formal beginning to the railroad, but was important to travelers many years before the first train arrived. The site was known to pioneers of the 1840s and 1850s as Big Meadows because it was an important place to rest and water animals before crossing the Forty-Mile Desert. James Blake is credited with establishing the first permanent settlement there in 1861, but he later sold his property and stage station to George Lovelock, who arrived in 1866. Lovelock donated eighty acres of his ranch to the Central Pacific Railroad to establish the town that now bears his name.