Oregon Trail Memorial (Kemmerer)

The emigrants this stone salutes never saw a town here. Kemmerer was laid out in 1897, decades after the wagons, as a coal town on the new Oregon Short Line, named for the Pennsylvania financier Mahlon Kemmerer. The nearest ground they did cross is the Hams Fork Plateau, about fourteen miles northwest, where a Bureau of Land Management marker stands over two graves: Margaret Campbell, who died on July 29, 1848, and Alfred Corum, a Missouri gold seeker whose train left six men behind with him, who died on July 4, 1849.

What the plaque says

To all pioneers who passed this way to win and hold the West Erected by popular subscription citizens of Kemmerer 1931

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fossil Butte National Monument — 12 mi
  The floor of a 52-million-year-old lake, packed with whole fish, the oldest complete bats and the only complete freshwater stingrays.

More markers nearby

• Coal Miner Memorial — 1.0 mi
• Fossil Butte — 4.9 mi
• Old Oregon Trail (Cokeville) — 29 mi
• Seeds-Kee-Dee Agie, Spanish River, Rio Verde, Green River — 29 mi