- Piedmont was a town in Wyoming that came and went with the Union Pacific Railroad, as it made its way across the state.

Today, all that's left are the three Piedmont charcoal kilns that you see behind me.

They were part of a crucial Wyoming industry that no longer exists.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(uplifting music) - [Narrator] Funding for Wyoming Chronicle is made possible in part by Wyoming Humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to promote engaged communities and improve our quality of life.

And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

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- We're here at the Piedmont Kilns with Josh Camp.

Josh, you are the superintendent at a nearby historic site, which is actually sort of disconnected from this, which you've got supervisory authority over both.

- I am the superintendent at Fort Bridger State Historic Site, and it may surprise you, but these two are actually a little more connected than you might think.

Moses Byrne, who came out here originally to set up a station along the Overland Stage Coach Trail, actually made his way from Fort Bridger, coming out here to establish this.

So in a way, they are actually quite connected.

And of course the Pony Express would've come right through here as well.

And they had a station here.

And of course, previously to this would've been Fort Bridger.

So of course my job as superintendent is to take care of these historic sites, make sure that, of course, we preserve them for as long as possible.

Of course a curator's job is, and we all know this as curators is a losing job, eventually we will lose to time.

But we're just trying to slow that, that descent as much as possible so we could preserve these for as long as possible.

- So it seems like we're out in the middle of complete nowhere.

But actually there was a time when there was a lot more activity here than there was because the Union Pacific Railroad was just right beside us.

- Absolutely, in fact, the road today that you may see over here is actually, of course, built where the original railroad would've come through.

So this was a main hub, of course, a railroad town that popped up as the railroad came through.

And then as it was moved just up north a little bit, going through Aspen Tunnel, which is a mile long tunnel they built to shorten the railroad a couple of miles.

The railroad stopped coming through here, and as soon as the train stopped coming, the town kind of died and became the ghost town that it is now.

- One of the features of the town are these three structures we see behind us, charcoal kilns.

Charcoal making was a big industry for a long time.

And now I don't, I mean people still get a bag of charcoal briquettes for their grill or something, so it still kind of exists.

But on the scale of, that these were, and for the intensity of the labor, was really something, wasn't it?

- Oh, absolutely.

And of course these kilns are actually not an uncommon site for the 1800s, throughout North America.

There were several kilns all over the western United States like this.

We're lucky enough to have some of the few that of course are still standing.

You can still see the full structure.

- Yeah, in fact, I'd read that just further up the line, in the days of the railroad's arrival, there was another little town called Hilliard, I think it was, that had many more than this.

Evanston had a big installation of charcoal.

- Absolutely.

- All gone.

Yep, these kilns, of course, if they don't have upkeep, they will collapse.

And we've got one of course on the end that has done just that before the state obtained it of course.

But the charcoal actually really made sense here.

And it's kind of an interesting story because originally this area, as the train was coming through here, they were pulling lumber from about 13 miles south of here up into the Uinta Mountains.

And they were bringing it originally as railroad ties.

So they were producing railroad ties, and then of course as soon as the railroad got far enough along, it didn't make sense to continue to bring those railroad ties.

But they already had a method of bringing tons of lumber to this area and suddenly the railroad ties were no longer needed.

So it made sense that you can think about it, if you've got all that lumber, charcoal kilns is just the next best option.

It's right by the railroad, build these here, you can bring that lumber in using the equipment you'd already established to put up the railroad, and get the railroad ties here.

So it was really kind of a no brainer to start building charcoal kilns here and start producing.

- You're gonna tell us more about how the, what the process actually was.

But in some ways it's not that much different from today, today's industry, if you have good transportation for whatever your product is, it makes sense to manufacture it there.

And that's what we had here, at least for a time.

- Absolutely.

- The town itself called Piedmont is, am I right in recollecting that Mr. Byrne, or is it Barron, however you pronounce it?

B Y R N E, I think, wanted to name the town after himself, but there were reasons that he didn't and it became Piedmont because of his wife.

Have I got that right?

- When he proposed that, of course, the railroad already had a huge sway here and they did not like the name at all.

They told him, "There's too many towns that sound too similar to that.

We need something unique, something distinct."

So his wife who was from Piedmont, Italy.

- I see.

- Recommended the name of Piedmont.

And of course that is what stuck.

- [Steve] It must be what, 25 feet tall or more?

- 30 feet tall, on these kilns to the point.

And yes, they are massive structures.

Again, they don't look near as impressive in photo or in film as they do when you actually come out here and just get a full scale of how big they are.

- And it's made of what?

- So made mostly out of limestone, which is actually something is found just east of here.

In fact, another good connection to Fort Bridger is it's very likely they were pulling this limestone from the same formation and the same quarry that the buildings at Fort Bridger were pulled from.

- You're sort of entering a different world almost when you go in there.

- Yeah.

- And of course, there wasn't a lot of activity inside once it was working.

In fact, that's the last place you'd want to be, probably.

- [Josh] Yeah, you'd be cooked pretty good if that was the case.

- Josh, we're now inside this, the middle of the three kilns.

The town dried up and sort of went away around the turn of the century.

And by the middle of the century, there really was nothing left here at all.

But the kilns remained and at some point after that, the state of Wyoming decided these are worth preserving.

What went on then and how have they been, what sort of preservation work has has been done?

- So of course this one's really fun to talk about, 'cause this one is also really easy to see.

If you look at the walls of these kilns, you can still see the original char from when these kilns were used.

Now it's really easy to tell where we've done restoration work, because you can see very clearly the newer mortar.

Yeah, so anywhere you see that new mortar, and again, you can see especially the weather here in Wyoming and as we all know gets pretty cold, snow gets pretty high, and that really has a harder effect on the lower ends of these.

But you can also see as on this side how structurally these kilns, as time does to all things, is bring it down and you can see our next restoration project will be making a repair on that.

- So it's ongoing, as you see a problem.

- This is something that we are continuously doing because again, everything needs maintenance and especially old stuff.

- So, when the kiln was new, it looked more or less inside that in terms of the colors, at least the way it does outside.

- Absolutely.

- So the blackness we're seeing was from the charring.

And so there's mortar there, but it's just been charred over.

Let me just say as well to the viewing audience, that's not gonna get this chance.

You come in here and you can smell the charcoal prevalently still.

And I don't when the last time a load of charcoal was made, but it's more than a hundred years ago.

- Oh absolutely, over a hundred years ago.

And again, you can still smell that it so prevalent here.

- And there's air circulation.

It's not that it's so completely closed up.

There's an opening up there, there's the door, there are other openings.

You tell us more about that.

So it isn't that it's just been cloistered, it's just there is so much charcoal made, and it's such a strong, strong smell.

There's remnants of a fourth one here when, as you understand it, when the state decided to do some preservation, was that one already in the bad state of disrepair that it was?

- That one was already collapsed at that point.

- But it's sort of interesting to the site, isn't it?

- I actually like it that way to have three of 'em that of course you can still walk in, and really see what they would've been like and then have one that shows, you know, as time works on things, that is what is going to happen.

- Just what would've happened, happened here.

So there's three intact ones, remnants of the fourth.

How many in your best judgment do you think there ever, there were when the industry was at its peak?

- So we have histories that tell us both four and five.

And we do have a circle just on the other side of that one that has collapsed that, that some call the fifth kiln, but it isn't the same size, and it certainly is a little closer to its counterpart than the other ones would've been.

So there is a chance that wasn't as kiln.

My personal thought is that it was probably just four kilns with maybe a smaller kiln there for many excess.

But really when you take it right down to its core, one of these kilns is already producing a huge amount of charcoal.

So you're already at an industrial level.

So possibly a fifth one, my personal guess would be a fourth.

- [Steve] What is charcoal?

It's not just a burned piece of wood, it's something far different from that.

- Yeah, so charcoal of course is the process of taking something, a biological material, in this case wood, and trying to get everything but the carbon content out of it.

Really, if you can get that straight carbon content, your fire that you're burning with, it is gonna be a much higher temperature.

Of course, the Iron Age was started because of charcoal production.

It is impossible to work iron without at least charcoal.

- Because you need a lot of heat.

- Yes.

- And wood just wasn't gonna cut it.

- Yep, wood, you can work, you know, little bits of iron, but if you really want to work big pieces of iron, you have to have at least charcoal to get that kind of heat you needed.

And of course, our world is in many ways built on iron, which shows the significance of how important creating that charcoal was.

- And now of course in many places throughout the centuries, people either didn't know about coal, or they didn't have access to it.

So they made coal themselves essentially, didn't they?

- Yeah.

- What would happen industrially speaking in this structure?

- So of course as you mentioned, this is at the point of industrial charcoal making and there was, you know, a smaller version of charcoal making.

But what's really impressive about this one is we know they were collecting timber, as we mentioned that originally started as railroad ties.

They were then able to convert that use of that wood to charcoal.

- [Steve] It was forest not far from here.

- Yep, so they were harvesting those forests, cutting six to eight foot sections of logs.

They would haul them in, of course, through the door here as we got in.

And they would start stacking 'em.

And of course as tightly as you can pack those logs would be as you wanted those.

And just to give you a good visual image, they weren't stacking 'em like this, they were putting them up.

So you'd have rounded logs sticking about eight foot tall, up and you would stack that, of course, up against the back wall first so you don't paint yourself into a corner, building your way slowly across.

And as you got enough of that first level of logs, you could then, you know, climb up on with the next set of logs and stack those as high as you could, 'cause again, the more wood you can get in here, the more charcoal you're gonna end up with.

And that means your production levels are gonna be higher.

So this thing would be just completely packed to the brim.

And of course any of the wood that would've been stacked above that, as the process is happening, that charcoal's gonna collapse and it would eventually come down and it would have an opportunity to turn to charcoal just like the rest.

So absolutely stack it to the very brim if you can possibly get away with it.

- And then what?

- And then of course, once your wood is packed in your charcoal kiln, the idea is of course to make an almost fire, as we kind of mentioned earlier, you need three things to make a fire.

You need a fuel source, a heat source, and oxygen to help burn that.

So for charcoal, we are actually going to take away one of those ingredients in fire.

We're gonna try and limit the oxygen to the point where it has just enough to smolder, but not enough to actually catch flame.

If you've got flames, your charcoal is being ruined.

So you don't want that, you want it to smolder.

So of course as we have this full of wood, we would then have a door that would go across this.

You close the door seal off that doorway, again trying to limit any way for oxygen to get in.

Now as mentioned, you did need some amount of oxygen and if you observe, you can actually see a series of holes in the bottom of this kiln leading to the outside.

This allows you to get the oxygen into the very bottom part, which, of course, is the hottest part of that fire.

And where you need to make sure that oxygen is just enough to make it char, but not enough to actually have it erupt in flames.

And you would actually have a series of workers who would work in shifts and this would be, had to be manned 24 hours.

And those guys would be watching the smoke content, they'd be watching for any indication of flame leaking out of that window.

And they would actually be blocking and then unblocking these holes.

- So these were expert tradespeople.

- These guys knew what they were doing.

- And the word for it is now a common proper name.

And the word for what they did was they were colliers.

Is that right?

- Mm-hmm.

- People who worked with coal.

- Absolutely, and an interesting thing to see on these, you can't really see it so well from the outside, or from the inside.

But if you look from the outside, you'll actually notice instead of the stone, there's a brick set on either end and they made that hole to the point where you could slide a brick in and out of that.

And that would've been what they were using to plug those holes to let less oxygen in.

And of course, you know, if the wind picks up, you're probably gonna have to plug a few more holes to make sure you don't burst into flames.

If the wind stops, you're gonna have to let a few out to make sure that it continues to smolder.

But again, four to to sometimes even up to eight days depending on different conditions and how well that went.

- So you come back in here, then pull the doorway, come back in, and the wood that had been piled to the very tip, if they could get it as close as they could, had been by a factor of what, 75% sometimes you had this layer, this pile of a different thing.

- Yeah, so of course what's happening on a chemical level at that point is all of the moisture, all of the different impurities that aren't carbon within that wood is being slowly charred away.

So when you end, you are gonna have something as 95 to 97% char, or just carbon content.

And that carbon is of course what we need to get that really hot burn.

- [Steve] And it's not ashes that you're seeing.

- No.

- All, everything that you talked about being dissipated is through the smoke.

- Mm-hmm.

- Am I right?

Is it a fair comparison, at least to the complete layman that I am to think about, you are sort of cooking it like you put it ingredients of a cake or something that were liquid, into an oven and what comes out is, and you don't set fire to it, you heat it, and what comes out is something different and you have this new substance.

- And that is actually a really, really good comparison to that.

Again, the whole idea of a kiln, whether it's a charcoal kiln, a lime kiln, or even a kiln for pottery is not necessarily to burn stuff or light stuff on fire.

It is to cook it.

It is to keep it in a heat controlled environment, where you can come out with a specific chemical reaction that causes a special product to come out, which is exactly what you're doing when you're baking.

You want that right chemical alignment, that right chemical temperature to turn out a cake.

- So you take, so now you come in, here's the layer of the the new charcoal, which might've been what about this tall maybe or depending on how much wood they had in.

- Yeah.

- And what is that substance like?

It's black.

- Oh, it's definitely black and it would've come in in variety of chunks, and one of the things you were trying to do is the bigger the logs you can get, the bigger chunks of charcoal you can get.

Now of course in that you're actually gonna end up with quite a bit of dust, which is still here on the floor where you've got these little tiny chugs, those aren't worth much on the market.

- [Steve] But that's charcoal.

- But that is still charcoal that is in here, of course.

And that charcoal, again, this size is not gonna be worth very much.

So you do want as big a chunks of charcoal as you can.

Of course, you can overdo that.

But really if you can get sizes from anywhere from about that big to about that big, you're gonna be right in the right place, 'cause remember a lot of what this was going to is for blacksmith shops.

So if a blacksmith can pull out chunks that are big enough and actually blacksmith would probably be looking for chunks closer to that size, but especially for your railroads as well, 'cause this was also something to be powering steam engines.

So if you can think if a steam engine guy could shovel it up and pitch it into the furnace for the steam engine, that's gonna be about the right size you want.

- So when we hear out west, well, they were shoveling coal for the engine, very likely what they meant was they were shoveling charcoal.

Josh, one of the things that is interesting to me always in thinking about history is that it's a lot more than military dates, and George Washington and Abe Lincoln, and there were people that lived here.

You told me you had a background originally in the field known as American Studies, which is more of this real people kind of study of history.

And that's what we're seeing here.

I don't know if we know the name of a person who worked in the kilns, but we know that they did, and they've left this great record.

How do you come at your job from that angle?

- Well, you know, people aren't really interested in dates.

If high school history classes have taught us anything, it's that, and really the key thing I try to focus on is, you know, history.

The word story is in that, if we can tell that story, people connect through stories.

Stories is what people like to hear.

And again, that story of those people who were here doing an immensely difficult job, I can only imagine being awake for, you know, a 24 hour shift trying to keep these kilns running and burning at just the right place.

What an incredible history, what incredible story that is.

- Which they did all year round.

- All year round.

- Winters are cold here.

- Yeah.

- It's a hot day out there today.

And regardless, they're having to do this because the demand was there.

They had to churn out the product.

- Absolutely, and if you're not getting that, you're not getting paid.

And if you're not getting paid, you're on the edge of starving, so.

- Now speaking of getting paid.

(Josh laughs) You shared a colorful anecdote about the Union Pacific Railroad, which goes right by the site.

It's one of the conveniences of having the kilns here.

In 1869 when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were nearing their meeting point, which is some miles away over the state line in Utah.

And one of the big wigs coming westward stopped here, and was forced to stop here.

What happened?

- Yeah, so absolutely, the vice president of the company was coming out to attend the ceremony of the Golden Spike that was supposed to happen on May 7th.

- [Steve] And this is Mr.

Dodge, is that right?

- That is absolutely correct.

Mr.

Dodge, vice president heading out this way.

And as he got to Piedmont, he actually was stopped and held hostage here.

They held him hostage for three days with a demand of $200,000 in payment for the dues that essentially they had not been paid yet here in Piedmont.

- And that's an astounding amount of money for back then, I mean.

- Absolutely.

- Would be the equivalent of I think tens of millions of dollars today.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And of course, you know, that was not something he was very happy about being held up on or very happy that he had to pay.

But he was kind of stuck in a situation.

He was already running immensely late by that point.

The whole ceremony was being delayed because of that.

So he ended up sending a wiretap and ended up paying that $200,000 to those workers.

So they did get their funding, but the consequences of that were, in a way, the end of Piedmont.

- [Steve] How do you mean?

- And that is because afterwards the railroad almost immediately started looking into an alternate route.

So Aspen Tunnel, which is not too far from here, just to the north, is a mile long tunnel that they built.

And if you can think of the work that went into that, just to save a couple of miles going through Piedmont.

And of course, as soon as Aspen Tunnel was done, I believe that was 1901, they rerouted the railroad to there, the railroad stopped coming to Piedmont, and that essentially spelled the doom of Piedmont.

- And you suspect that that at least part of it was because Mr.

Dodge and the other railroad officials were not pleased about what had happened here.

And they were gonna make somebody pay.

- Make somebody pay for it.

And even if it took 'em, you know, quite a few years to get to that, I do believe that was a good chunk of that motivation, 'cause again, when you look at it, it saves a couple miles of railroad, an entire mile long tunnel.

I have to think there could have been an easier way and there may have been something other than just practicality behind that motivation.

- So, Piedmont then suffered to an extent, maybe a lesser extent at least immediately than so many, that so many other these so-called end of track towns did.

The railroad's kind of through with your site, it moves on, and then you either have a town that can survive or you don't.

Piedmont lasted for a while longer.

- For a good chunk of time for sure.

And in fact some of the original people who lived in that town were the Guild family, and the Guild family actually owns most of this property around us today and still owns a large portion of Piedmont, of course at this point they use it mostly for ranching 'cause there's just not enough to justify living out here.

But this was a place where many members of the Guild family continued to live for a long time after the railroad had ended here.

- We're off the, we're near Interstate 80, but we turned on a dirt road and then drove, I don't know, 10 miles or so down here, it's remote.

But people still make their way here to see this, don't they?

- Absolutely, we still actually, especially for one of our unmanned sites, we still get pretty good visitation out here.

Just about every time I've checked out here, at some point while I'm out here, I'll have at least one family stop by.

Even at Fort Bridger where we have much larger visitation, where I'm stationed permanently.

- [Steve] How far away is that?

- It's about 18 miles away from here.

We have people come in and they ask about the charcoal kilns all the time, asking to make sure they're going the right way, make sure they know how to get there.

In fact, we've got kind of a specific little setup for anyone working in the museum that says, "Oh yeah, you can take this direction, this direction, this direction, and that'll get you to Piedmont."

So it is something that still has a lot of curiosity out there.

And again, it is a very interesting and colorful history here at Piedmont.

- The kilns themselves no longer used for charcoal.

Has there ever been any talk about, at least for once a year or once in a while of trying to sort of fire one of them up again?

It would be a big job, I presume.

- It would be a very big job.

And of course, one of the things that we'd have to consider in today's standards would be OSHA and safety means of that.

Because this was by no means a- - [Steve] A safe job.

- A safe job.

This was a very dangerous job.

And again, it is something where we would have to, if we were to replicate that, have someone out here with enough skill to keep a watch on it for the entirety of a four to seven day span to make sure that that charcoal came out correctly.

So it's something I would absolutely be in support of doing, but it is gonna take a lot of resources if we were to ever do that.

- In this vein of sort of the real people anonymity of so many of the people who did this work, I think we've covered some of that, but there were some names known to popular history that have a connection to Piedmont.

- Absolutely, so, of course, probably the most famous being Butch Cassidy.

Butch Cassidy famously met his gang here right before they ran up to a town over in Idaho, Montpelier and robbed the bank there.

Of course, after that they had a bit of a rough time getting back to Piedmont where they were supposed to meet.

And at some point the money from that bank robbery went missing.

So this has oftentimes been a place of mystery because of course everyone wants to know what happened to Butch Cassidy's cash.

- Well, where is it?

- We don't know.

(laughs) - Came all this way and we don't know.

- Yeah, in fact one of the the fun things is that story does draw people, but it also in a lot of ways ended up being something that tore the old ghost town apart, as buildings were being abandoned, there were people who thought, you know, "Maybe Butch Cassidy's cash is hiding in one of those buildings."

- [Steve] In the rafters or something.

- Yeah, so it was not uncommon for as soon as these buildings were abandoned, for floorboards to be pulled up, walls to be opened up, to see if there was anything hiding in there.

And at least as far as I know, it still hasn't been found.

One other famous person associated with this town would be a gal by the name of Martha Canary, which of course no one remembers the name Martha Canary.

Do you have a guess as who that is?

- Calamity Jane?

- That would be absolutely correct.

Most people don't know that one.

- I'm a Wyoming person.

- Oh, absolutely.

So Calamity Jane actually spent a good chunk of her childhood here, of course, growing up here.

And at the age of 14 she actually moved over to Fort Bridger and had her first official job as an Army laundress at Fort Bridger.

So we have got a very strong tie to Calamity Jane here.

- How long have you been at Bridger?

- So I've been at Bridger four years now, so, and hopefully another good couple decades there.

- Years to come, you like it there?

- Absolutely.

- Satisfied with that job, and aren't looking necessarily to get to the next jewel in the crown.

You think you're there?

- Oh, I think I'm there.

- Josh Camp, this has been a huge amount of fun for me today personally.

Great part of the job is seeing these places that I've heard about, read about, thought about, and now I've got a reason to come and see them.

But I'm sure you, what you'd say is everybody has a reason to come and see it.

If you're interested, you should.

It's worth the effort, isn't it?

- It is absolutely worth the effort to see these.

And again, state parks are here to provide you with wonderful experiences that will hopefully give you a richer life and push you on into the future with a positive beat in your step, so.

- Well, I can tell you're a true believer and hope you keep on doing this for as long as you can and I appreciate you being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Absolutely, thank you for having me.

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