Recovery Begins At Hartville, The Historic Mining Town That Nearly Went Up In Flames

HARTVILLE — Danielle Cundall was fussing with a sprinkler connected in her side yard along her Main Street home, trying to get water sprayed on the brown grass before it withered away in the upper-90-degree heat Monday.

Everyone’s grass in this historic hematite iron-ore mining town is wrestling with ways to get their yards watered after much of the water supply over the past week was diverted to firefighters who needed the tiny town’s water line from Guernsey to extinguish a nearly 29,000-acre wildfire that came inches from sending the few scattered homes along Main Street up in flames.

A sign at the entrance to the town on Monday read, “Thank You Firefighters,” on a charred piece of plywood.

Water is everything in this part of parched Wyoming.

The filtered water is pumped up about 300 feet in elevation to Hartville from a 500-foot-deep well near the North Platte River a few miles away.

Getting water sprayed on lawns over the last week was virtually impossible. Besides, keeping the grass green and vegetable gardens watered wasn’t really much on their minds.

When Hartville and surrounding communities north of Guernsey were evacuated twice this past week because of the Pleasant Valley Fire — which is now 65% contained — all roads were cordoned off, making it difficult for locals to get to where they needed to go.

However, Danielle Cundall’s husband Clay knew a short cut over a gravel and dirt road.

There are two roads that lead from Guernsey about 5 miles to the south.

There’s the dirt and gravel Pleasant Valley Road that empties onto Wyoming Highway 270 about a mile short of Hartville, and the more-traveled Wyoming 270 that runs north up from U.S. Highway 26, the main arterial road between Guernsey and Fort Laramie nearly 12 miles to the east.

Driving up Highway 270 on Monday, it’s easy to see how close Hartville came to being the next small Wyoming ghost town.

The burn area extends to the east of Wyoming 270 from Quarry Road off the north and south thoroughfare from Guernsey to Hartville, and in spots between Pleasant Valley and 270.

Hard To Miss

The blackened hills are hard to miss. In some spots, the hills looked similar to mountains of dark coal near the mouths of mines in Appalachia.

Clay and Danielle Cundall were at the Platte County Fair and Rodeo in Wheatland when they got a call from Danielle’s aunt last Tuesday that the Pleasant Valley Fire was threatening Hartville and that everyone needed to evacuate.

That was at 4 p.m.

The telephone call prompted Clay to jump into his Dodge Ram 3500 heavy-duty turbo diesel truck and speed away to his home 30 miles to the north, making the trip over back roads and the bumpy Pleasant Valley Road in 20 minutes.

He flew at speeds up to 85 mph, or was it 90 mph?

He couldn’t recall, and neither would he say how fast he was driving under the ominous-looking Burlington Northern tunnel on Pleasant Valley.

“I was thinking what I was going to grab all the way up,” Clay Cundall said of his Indy 500 pedal-to-the-metal drive.

The first thing he grabbed in the house were important documents like Social Security cards, birth certificates, a marriage license and other treasured things that were tossed into easy-to-melt Tupperware containers.

The Tupperware also held lockets of hair from the couple’s 11-year-old daughter Paislee, and her wrist band from the hospital when she was born.

He then threw into the bed of his truck Danielle’s old saddle that had been in her family for six generations, their jackets with Danielle’s “Lazy Y Heart” brands on them, and the guns.

‘Her Boots’

“I grabbed a few changes of clothes for everyone, blankets and pillows, and her boots,” Clay Cundall said.

Zip, the couple’s blue heeler Australian cattle dog, jumped into the front seat.

Clay sped back to Wheatland, just in time to see Paislee’s show her pet pig, Tilly, at 6 p.m.

That was Evacuation Round One, which happened on Tuesday evening and Wednesday.

When everyone returned Thursday, Evacuation Round Two happened Friday and Saturday — after which time the orders were lifted, paving the way for everyone to return a second time.

The Cundalls stayed in Wheatland in their fifth-wheel camper on the second evacuation because they wanted to see Paislee sell off her pig to the highest bidder Friday.

Scott Harmon, the owner of the legendary Miners and Stockman’s Steakhouse and Spirits in the town’s center, couldn’t believe his eyes on the second evacuation.

Plumes of thick smoke made the normally blue sky black as the sun turned the world an apocalyptic orange.

“It was really dark,” Harmon said.

On Monday, Harmon was puffing cigarettes on the outdoor eating patio of the restaurant — Wyoming’s oldest — thinking about the $10,000 to $15,000 in business he lost this past week.

“I lost the whole week,” he stewed.

No Steak

His iconic restaurant is only open Thursdays through Sundays, and with the evacuations and road closures to town with the fire threatening to burn up everything, the reservation-only restaurant canceled everything.

Harmon said that the evacuation went as smoothly as it could with the exception of a few bumps.

The alert system to notify people in town of the impending emergency didn’t work all that well, though the backup of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office and emergency personnel going door-to-door worked just fine.

The “reverse 911” emergency services of notifying residents in Hartville didn’t go all that smoothly as the county had recently changed over from one emergency notification app to another and not all the profiles of people transferred over.

This became a larger problem only because the tiny population in Hartville is mostly an older generation who aren’t computer or smartphone savvy.

Almost Heaven

The town is almost heaven.

Russian olive trees line the street in the northern edge of town that leads out to Sunrise, where the old hematite mine closed in the 1980s.

The olive trees are an eastern European varietal, which makes sense given that so many Italian, Greek and Lebanese immigrants came to settle in Hartville more than a century ago to work in the mine.

Darrell and Marian Offe were retracing the path of their 69th wedding anniversary in a Canadian resort town at Banff National Park when they got alerts notifying them of the fire.

“It’s beautiful country. There’s no smoke or fires,” said the 92-year-old Darrell Offe of Banff.

By the time they arrived back in Hartville on Sunday in their well-maintained Lexus with 500,000 miles on the odometer, firefighters and others were mopping up.

Still, said Offe, the aroma of the fire was in the air.

“We were monitoring it on the road. We were sure Hartville would be burned out,” Darrell Offe said.

Marian Offe, 90, said that she was saddened by the news of the fire and tumbled to the ground getting out of the car when they finally rolled up in front of their home in Hartville.

Her Italian grandparents came to Hartville in 1912 to work in the hematite mine in Sunrise, and she was born in the home where she now lives.

Most of the Italian families with whom she grew up with have either left Hartville or passed away.

Several of these people are buried in the Hartville cemetery less than a mile south on Wyoming 270 with last names written on tombstones like Brazzale, Capozzo, Carollo, Francescato, Giacetti, Massi and Testily.

Italians Are Gone

“They’ve all passed on,” said Marian Offe, whose maiden name is Testolin.

Her ancestors came to Hartville from near the Dolomite Mountains in northeastern Italy.

By the door of their house is a bucket full of corks from wine bottles that they have saved from their celebrations with others.

Linda Torres, who lives on Gambell Street next door to the Offes, said she ended up sleeping in her Hyundai Santa Fe with her husband, Joe, down by the Trail Ruts Golf Course outside of Guernsey.

“That was the second night,” she said. The first night they paid $220 to stay at the Cobblestone hotel on the western edge of Guernsey.

“That was full price,” said Torres, rolling her eyes. “We came back on Thursday, but I wasn’t comfortable here because it was still smoking,” she said.

By Friday, smoke was still swirling in plumes floating out of the canyons of Hartville.

“You could see debris and ash floating down,” she said of ash flakes the size of half-dollar coins.

Contact Pat Maio at pat@cowboystatedaily.com

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.