Coal from the hills around Aladdin fed the gold smelters at Lead and Deadwood across the South Dakota line. The Black Hills Coal Company's mine was working by 1898, when a short rail line joined it to the Chicago and North Western at Belle Fourche, and the wooden tipple on the hillside below the mine was where the coal was handled: dumped into the gabled bin at the top, then let down the chute by gravity into railroad cars and sorted on the way into nut, egg and larger sizes. Italian, Swedish and Scottish miners, among others, worked the seams, where roof falls and coal-dust explosions were common dangers. The state mine inspector's reports show output peaking around 1901 and nearly gone by 1911. Mining at Aladdin ended in 1942, and the mine entrance was later blown shut.
No one is sure exactly when the tipple was built, and it is believed to be the last nineteenth-century wooden coal tipple still standing in the country. Its timbers rotted where the coal slack lay against them, its top half collapsed, and preservationists stabilized what remained. In the 1990s the state's abandoned-mine program made the site safe and laid an interpretive path past the tipple, the mine adit and the hoist house. The Alliance for Historic Wyoming now lists it as in danger of collapse.
About a mile west, the Aladdin General Store has been open since 1896 in a town laid out by the coal magnate Mahlon Kemmerer, and it still holds the post office.
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