Beside a graded dirt road in Uinta County amid rolling bucolic pastureland at the edge of the ghost town of Piedmont, Wyoming, passersby may do a double-take when they come upon a cluster of 30-foot-tall stone structures that look like ancient beehives or the nose cones of missiles poking out from underground.
Thirty feet wide at the base and standing more than 30 feet tall, the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns sit on a seldom traveled stretch of County Road 173 about 10 miles southwest of Evanston, and the giant limestone structures have been a southwest Wyoming landmark since 1869.
More than a hundred years since their abandonment, the subdued smell of long-ago fires still emanates from the blackened bellies of the kilns, as though the coals of a charcoal grill were warming up nearby.
Caked layers of charcoal crumble from the walls at the touch of a hand. Mortar seams streak down the dark interior of the kilns like prongs of lightning. And it was with lightning speed that this once bustling enterprise came to an end.
Lucrative Enterprise, Lightning Demise
The kilns were built by Mormon pioneer Moses Byrne for the purpose of turning Uinta Mountain timber into pure-carbon charcoal through a slow burn process, smoldering tightly packed pine for eight days at a time, according to the Wyoming Historical Society.
With access to vast Uinta Mountain timber and constructed along the Union Pacific Railroad’s Piedmont track, the charcoal found ready markets in the Utah Territory. Its ability to hold extremely high heat in smelters made it a vital resource for the era’s burgeoning blacksmith industry.
At the turn of the 20th century, however, the railroad line was rerouted to the north, leaving Piedmont’s charcoal product without viable means to reach the marketplace.
The kilns were abandoned virtually overnight.
Less than 10 miles south of Interstate 80 east of Evansville is a cluster of 30-foot limestone beehive-looking things. Built in 1869, they’re the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns, remarkably preserved symbols of Wyoming’s early history. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Less than 10 miles south of Interstate 80 east of Evansville is a cluster of 30-foot limestone beehive-looking things. Built in 1869, they’re the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns, remarkably preserved symbols of Wyoming’s early history. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Less than 10 miles south of Interstate 80 east of Evansville is a cluster of 30-foot limestone beehive-looking things. Built in 1869, they’re the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns, remarkably preserved symbols of Wyoming’s early history. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Less than 10 miles south of Interstate 80 east of Evansville is a cluster of 30-foot limestone beehive-looking things. Built in 1869, they’re the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns, remarkably preserved symbols of Wyoming’s early history. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Less than 10 miles south of Interstate 80 east of Evansville is a cluster of 30-foot limestone beehive-looking things. Built in 1869, they’re the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns, remarkably preserved symbols of Wyoming’s early history. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily)
Vigilante City
A similar fate befell the nearby railroad boomtown a few miles to the northwest, Bear River City, a raucous end-of-track town that epitomized the freewheeling lawlessness of frontier life, the Historical Society reports.
The town was first settled by lumberjacks and tracklayers who arrived in 1867 to supply ties to the approaching railroad. The settlement quickly swelled to more than 2,000 residents, whose primary pastimes were realized among the town’s numerous saloons and gambling parlors.
It developed a reputation as a hub for the nefarious elements of Western society, expressed at the time in pages of a traveling newspaper called the Frontier Index, who reported that Bear River City was “the liveliest city, if not the wickedest in America.”
The paper went so far as to advocate for vigilantism to remove the town’s unsavory residents, but that didn’t go over well, according to the Wyoming Historical Society.
In response to the paper’s plea, a mob burned down the Index’s Bear River City office on Nov. 20, 1868.
Following that, other townsfolk retaliated against the mob, resulting in a battle that lasted through the night. Troops from Fort Bridger arrived in the morning to quell the unrest.
In the end, it wasn’t frontier violence that killed the town. Rather, as with Piedmont and its remarkable charcoal kilns, losing the railroad was the death blow for Bear River City.
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
