Ward Charcoal Ovens
White Pine County, White Pine County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Ward Charcoal Ovens. These ovens were constructed during the mid 1870’s and are larger and of finer construction than most other ovens found in Nevada. They are 27 feet in diameter and 30 feet high with a capacity of about 35 cords of wood which was burned for a period of 12 days to produce about 50 bushels of good solid charcoal per cord.The charcoal was used in the smelters at nearby Ward, about 30 to 50 bushels being required to reduce one ton of ore.Each filling of one of these ovens required the total tree crop from 5 or 6 acres of land. During the late 1870’s the hills and mountains around many mining camps were completely stripped of all timber for a radius of up to 35 miles.As railroads penetrated the west charcoal was replaced by coke made from coal, and the charcoal industry faded.“The real worth of the old charcoal ovens is their historical function in reminding present day Americans of a now-vanished industry, without which the great silver and lead bonanzas of the early west could not have been harvested.” Nell Murbarger.
Erected by zzzNevada State Park System
The Story
These beehive-shaped stone ovens, built in the mid-1870s and unusually large at 27 feet across and 30 feet tall, turned cordwood into charcoal for the silver-lead smelters at nearby Ward. Each burn consumed some 35 cords over twelve days, and feeding a single oven took the timber from five or six acres—so voracious that the hills for miles around were stripped bare. When railroads brought cheaper coke, the charcoal industry faded away.
Why it matters
The ovens are a stark monument to the environmental cost of the Western mining boom, whose silver bonanzas depended on entire forests reduced to fuel.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ward Mining District
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In the silver-hungry decades after the Civil War, the Egan Range foothills briefly roared to life as Ward, a boomtown that swelled to about 1,500 souls between 1876 and 1882. A single chamber of the Ward mine gave up a million dollars in silver, yet the camp raised its first school in an abandoned house and never built a church, settling disputes instead by vigilante committee and hanging rope. Abandoned by the late 1880s, Ward saw brief revivals in 1906 and the 1960s as new methods reopened old ground.
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When Taylor and John Platt struck silver and gold here in 1873, a typical mining town sprang up around the Argus and Monitor mines, and within seven years it claimed thousands of residents, saloons, general stores, an opera house, and a Wells Fargo office. By the mid-1880s Taylor was the hub of county life, famous for its annual Fourth of July celebration. Mining sputtered on until 1919, when a cyanide plant briefly revived the district, and the local mines ultimately gave up more than three million dollars in silver, gold, copper, and lead.
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