06/21/2026
On my way to Idaho for a family reunion last week, and I stopped at the Ward Charcoal Kilns near Ely, NV. These kilns were built in 1870 and used to make charcoal to smelt ore from the nearby gold and silver mines. Trees were chopped down and wood was burned/smoldered in the kilns for 12 days in order to produce several bushels of charcoal. This method of using charcoal for smelting was very inefficient and an ecological disaster. Each kiln required cutting down five acres of trees. In most 19th-century mining towns throughout the West, within a decade, the landscape was completely denuded of trees for a radius of 35 miles. By the late 1800s, most of the forests were gone and new railways brought in coke made from coal from the East to fire the smelting furnaces of the Western mining towns.
