Lost to time, not to memory

The town of Carbon was described in the Lippincott's "Gazetteer of the World", a geographical dictionary of the world published in 1893, as a post-village of Carbon County.

"It is 84 miles by rail northwest of Laramie. Coal mining is on here. It has three churches, a bank, a common and high school, and a newspaper office. Pop. 1140."

Carbon County, in 1890 had a population of 6,587. In 1870, the number of people was 1,368.

Hanna is not listed; nor is Saratoga or Encampment. Rawlins had a population of 2235. Medicine Bow's geographic location is recorded, but nothing else.

The times have changed since Lippincott put out that two volume edition.

Most significantly, Carbon is a ghost town.

Jeanette Fischer, a longtime Medicine Bow resident who recently moved to Laramie to be closer to her family, knows the history of Carbon well. Her husband, the Fischer family, have lived around Medicine Bow for generations. It was her husband, Richard, who donated the boots made of "Big Nose" George Parrot's skin. He had found them in an old trunk in the family's storage area. They can be seen at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.

"The town of Carbon started in 1868 and its demise was in 1902," Fischer said. "It is very strongly connected with Hanna because a lot of the miners that left Carbon went to Hanna. So did some buildings, but some went to Medicine Bow and Elk Mountain."

Carbon sprung out of nowhere on the high desert terrain in northern Carbon County. In its early years, it was a spread out, disorganized place of dugouts and cabins. As the town matured, the rough buildings gave way to stable stone and wooden structures. Carbon Creek ran through the center of town, but the real water supply came in on railroad tank cars to fill a cistern.

The Wyoming Coal and Mining Company first ran the mines in Carbon. In 1874, Union Pacific took the mines over.

During the town's rise to prominence from the late 1860s to the 1880s, seven coal mines were created to feed the appetite of trains going across the USA.

The Fischer family owned the blacksmith shop and livery stable in town.

Fischer said the town was not an easy place to live. There were labor disputes between the miners and Union Pacific. The townspeople and miners had a strong streak of independence and roughness that the railroad did not find desirable as a terminus.

Fischer said Carbon enhanced its reputation as a place where law was taken into citizens' hands when, in 1881, angry miners took over a train and pulled off "Dutch" Charley Burris who was in custody and going to Rawlins to stand trial for the murder of Union Pacific Special Agent Tip Vincent and a deputy sheriff, Bob Widdowfield. Burris was hanged from a telegraph pole near the tracks. Parrot was also involved in these murders.

Carbon had many miners and railroad men with families by 1890 and the town swelled to a population of over 1,000 people.

It was not to last.

Mines were closing but it was not until the early morning of June 27, 1890, when a drunken guest in the Scranton House knocked over a kerosene lamp, did Carbon's death knell begin. The fire destroyed the entire downtown business center north of the tracks. Twenty buildings or more went up in flames. Few structures were insured because there was no true water supply and no ability to offer fire protection.

The town would never recover.

Although Carbon reached its peak population of 1,140 in 1890, Union Pacific opened new coal mines at Hanna that same year and built a spur to Hanna from the main line west of Medicine Bow.

The independent ways of Carbon made Union Pacific abandon the town.

In 1899, Union Pacific changed its entire route from Omaha, to Ogden, Utah, improving the railroad line. Carbon was off the route and the new line went through Hanna.

Unlike Carbon, it was a company town and the streets were as uniform as in the military and the houses exactly the same.

In 1902, the mines at Carbon closed for good and the town's life force ebbed away with some residents staying on for the next couple decades.

Eventually it was entirely deserted and became a ghost town.

Old foundations, roads, mine ruins and the cindered roadbed of the original line of the Union Pacific Railroad are what is left of Carbon.

"When I first moved here, people would come from all over and wanted to know where Old Carbon was," Fischer said. "They brought their metal detectors, so now there is hardly anything left compared to before. There used to be a lot of half buildings still standing."

Fischer said, although Old Carbon has been picked over, the place is still interesting as well as historical.

"There was a time when a person from Elk Mountain put up interpretation signs indicating places like the old Scranton House, churches and the mercantile places," Fischer said. "There is a map that is hand drawn by Dan Kinnaman that has all these old buildings listed. It is really well done."

Carbon's cemetery is still present and dates back to the late 1860s. It has not been abandoned.

Family and friends continue to maintain individual plots.

Fischer said in 2003 the Carbon Cemetery Association was formed and was instrumental in restoring the cemetery, fixing the perimeter fence and standing up stones that had fallen over.

"My husband was president of that board," Fischer said. "Paula Jack was secretary/treasurer and her husband, Bill, was also on the board and Nancy Anderson was the vice-president and historian and then there was Victor, her husband. Later Kaylyn Palm and Sarah Jones came on board."

Fischer said there were still people being buried at Carbon cemetery after the town dried up.

Victims of the Hanna mine explosions were buried in the Carbon cemetery in 1903 and 1908. Carbon's last resident died in 1912. A few burials took place after the town was abandoned and today there are still occasional residents of the area put to rest there.

The small five acre site that is the resting place for the cemetery has a landscape that is relatively flat with a rising hill, covered in natural grasses and a few trees. The old town of Carbon lies over a rise just to the south and is not visible from the cemetery.

According to the Carbon Cemetery Association, the site has 239 marked graves with another 98 documented burials that are no longer identified by markers. Additional unmarked graves may be present. Many headstones are marked with family names and indicate multiple burials at one location. The names indicate that many Carbon residents were largely from the British Isles, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

The Carbon Cemetery Association points out most of the unnamed graves are marked with small stone rectangles. These were probably marked with wooden crosses indicating the name of the deceased and have deteriorated over the years from harsh weather. Of the graves that have headstones, most are granite and marble.

The Carbon Cemetery Association believes the most notable and culturally connected tombstones are the Finnish grave-markers. All consist of a tall vertical metal bar with a flat vertical metal plate bolted to the top. The metal plates were painted with information about the deceased but, today, are blank from weathering. The burial tradition using metal grave-markers was brought to southern Wyoming by Finnish miners and their families.

Fischer can remember the enthusiasm back in 2003 when the cemetery was first spruced up to its former days of being able to see the gravestones and markers.

"Sixty five people turned out to clean up that cemetery," Fischer said. "They brought rakes and shovels and I would defy anyone to have kept up with Victor Anderson. I couldn't believe how much that man could do. They got rid of 17 loads of sagebrush that was put on a flatbed that was owned by the Palms."

The Palms own the land around Carbon.

"The next thing that happened was the Jacks family went to the national park service and got some help cleaning some of the headstones," Fischer said. "The next year they found a company that gave a special formula to clean the headstones and monuments. They cleaned over 100."

She said there is a cleanup every year, usually the first Saturday in May, weather permitting.

"It is always done by Memorial Day," Fischer said. "On that day, there would be a big program. I guess you would say my husband was in charge of the program. So I guess I would say, the Andersons (Nancy and Victor) were in charge of the cleanup, the Jacks (Paula and Bill) were in charge of the monuments and Rich (her husband) coordinating the Memorial Day Program."

The Carbon Cemetery Association works closely with the Hanna Basin Museum and its director, Sunshine Solaas, has taken visitors out to Carbon to see the site on several occasions.

There is a company that Fischer said was instrumental to the preserving of Carbon and its cemetery.

Fischer said, in October 2010, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation deeded 40 acres to the Carbon Cemetery Association. Included in these acres are part of the Carbon town site and about one-third of the cemetery's fenced area. She said that Anadarko also helped the cemetery get on the National Register of Historic Places.

The cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 7, 2011.

"It is the only cemetery in Wyoming on the National Register of Historic Places," Fischer said. "Nancy Anderson deserves a lot of credit for it getting on that register. There were many involved, but she was the ramrod that got it done."

Fischer said she feels that Old Carbon could be a place for guests of Carbon County to visit. She thinks interpretive signs need to be up in the town to show where and what buildings stood. She thinks the museums of Elk Mountain, Hanna and Medicine Bow each have artifacts from Carbon that can present a picture of what the town was like at its peak.

"The railroad and mining culture that started with this town back in 1868 is not only important to Carbon County and Wyoming, but also to the United States," Fischer said. "It would be a tragedy if we let time march by and forget this town and its contribution to our present day world."

Historians, like Fischer, make it easier to remember.