The westernmost and final site on your route along the historic trails across Wyoming is the ghost town of Piedmont. Although it’s a small town that can only be viewed from a road, not truly explored, I enjoyed Piedmont enormously.
One reason I like Piedmont is its beehive charcoal kilns, which you will come upon just before you arrive at the townsite. I confess to being almost a kiln addict, having visited hundreds in the West, from New Mexico to California to Washington to Montana. Piedmont has three standing kilns and a fourth in ruins. Pioneer settler Moses Byrne built them in 1889 to provide fuel for smelters in the Utah Valley. The kilns are thirty feet high and thirty feet in diameter, a typical size for beehive kilns.
Kilns were crucial to the mining process. Smelting, which eliminates the impurities still in ore after the milling process, requires enormous heat. The materials available in the late 1800s for that heat were wood and coal, both of which burn too quickly and produce too little heat to be efficient. Kilns were used to convert a fast-burning, low-heat substance into a slow-burning, high-heat fuel. Wood was turned to charcoal; coal became coke. Think of your pre-propane backyard grill. Wood will not efficiently cook your burgers, but charcoal will.
These kilns are the first ones featured in this book, followed by ones at Nicholia and Bayhorse, Idaho; Frisco, Utah; and Ward, Nevada. They all converted wood to charcoal by heating wood in a controlled-burn process. Wood was loaded into a ground-level opening (the holes facing away from the road at Piedmont). First dry wood, followed by green wood, was stacked as high as possible. A higher door in the rear of the kiln (the side facing the road at Piedmont), which was reached through a ramp, was used to finish filling the kiln. Kilns of this size could hold up to fifty cords of wood. The doors were closed and sealed, the wood set afire, and the air within the kiln carefully regulated through vents that were alternately opened and sealed.
You can view the Piedmont kilns without trespassing. This view, the side away from the road, shows the lower “front” doors to the kilns.
This slow “cooking” process would take about ten days. At that time, the kilns were opened and the fire was doused with water. The charcoal was removed and, after cooling, shipped to a smelter.
The process was very similar when coal was converted to coke. Such kilns, when using coal, are called “coke ovens.”
The town of Piedmont, located immediately beyond the kilns, was initially called Byrne for Moses Byrne and his family. In 1868, when the Union Pacific Railroad came right through the Byrne property (you were driving on the original railroad bed as you came in), Byrne was renamed Piedmont (French for “at the foot of the mountains”). It became a tent town for the railroad construction crews and the eventual location of a roundhouse and water tank.
Piedmont remained an important spot on the Union Pacific until the railroad put a tunnel through Aspen Mountain, shortening the route and eliminating Piedmont entirely. Not surprisingly, the town became a ghost. The final resident was sheepherder William Taylor, who in 1949 froze to death in a blizzard.
WALKING AND DRIVING AROUND PIEDMONT
As mentioned earlier, you cannot explore the buildings of Piedmont, because they are on private property and posted against trespassing. But you can get a good view from the road of its dozen wooden buildings, seven of which are under roof at this writing. Binoculars or a telephoto lens on your camera will help you enjoy the site. Outside the “no trespassing” area are the aforementioned kilns and, south of the kilns, the Byrne family cemetery.
To reach the cemetery, I walked about 130 yards south from the road. (You have to hop over or step into a narrow manmade water-filled ditch.) More than two dozen gravestones mark the site, with every one identifying either a Byrne by birth or by marriage. A sign dates the cemetery from 1870 until 1931, but there are more recent graves than that. Patriarch Moses Byrne (1820 to 1904), who built the kilns, and his wife, Catherine (1829 to 1902), had at least five children. Of the ones buried in the Byrne Cemetery, Moses and Catherine outlived them all. One hopes there were other Byrne children not buried there.
Piedmont’s remnants are what dedicated ghost town seekers yearn for. Just keep to the road to avoid trespassing.
WHEN YOU GO
From Fort Bridger, return to Interstate 80 and head west to Exit 24, Leroy Road, which is 10.3 miles from Fort Bridger. Take County Road 173 for 6.9 miles to the charcoal kilns. The Piedmont townsite is .2 of a mile beyond.
At 3.4 miles from the interstate, before you reach Piedmont, a plaque commemorates an important historic spot in southwestern Wyoming. A short distance away is the site of Muddy Creek Camp, where Brigham Young and the first group of Mormons, 149 in all, camped on their way to the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. With plenty of water and grass, the camp became a principal stop for more than seventy thousand Mormons who followed. Later, the site became a resting point for the U.S. Army, the Pony Express, and a stagecoach line, the last of which built a station there. The coming of the railroad made Muddy Creek Camp unnecessary.