Ward Charcoal Ovens

Twenty miles south of Ely, down a road that turns to gravel, six great stone beehives stand in a row in a silent basin of the Egan Range. Each is thirty feet tall and twenty-seven across at the base, built of pale volcanic rock, with a low door at the front and a black scorch still on the inside walls. They look like something left by a vanished civilization, and in a sense they were: these are charcoal ovens, the best-preserved in Nevada, and the most intact relic of the hidden industry that made every silver town on this road possible. It is a detour off the loneliest road, and one of its strangest, quietest payoffs.

The ovens are kilns for making charcoal, raised in 1876 from quartz tuff quarried right here. Their beehive shape was a piece of imported technology — an Italian design far more efficient than the open pits it replaced, the curved walls bouncing heat back into the center while small vents at the base let the burners fine-tune the draft. Each oven swallowed about thirty-five cords of pinyon pine and juniper at a loading, and a single firing — fill it, burn slow and starved of air, then cool and empty — took the better part of two weeks and yielded well over a thousand bushels of charcoal.

All that charcoal had one purpose: to feed fire hot enough to smelt silver. Two miles north lay the Ward Mining District, where silver found in 1872 had grown into a town of fifteen hundred with its own smelters and stamp mill, and those furnaces ran on charcoal by the ton. It was the same arrangement that powered — and eventually bloodied — Eureka up the road: a mining boom utterly dependent on burning the surrounding forests into fuel. The ovens are the machinery of that bargain, left standing where the smelters and the town have almost entirely vanished.

They were built by carbonari — itinerant Swiss-Italian charcoal burners and stonemasons who carried the craft from the old country and moved camp to camp across the mining West. The fit of the stonework here is finer than at most Nevada oven sites, the work of men who did nothing else. It is worth standing inside one and looking up at that careful dome: the same immigrant labor that Ely's murals celebrate and that Eureka's charcoal war ground up, written here in rock instead of paint or blood.

For all their permanence, the ovens worked for only about three years. By 1879 it was over — partly because the richest ore had played out, but just as much because the fuel had. An oven cannot move, and as the axes worked outward the nearest pinyon and juniper fell first, until hauling wood to the kilns cost more than the charcoal was worth. The hills for miles around were stripped bare, slow to grow back in this dry country. The boom that raised these domes also ate the forest that fed them, and then it was done.

The town of Ward did not survive; built on low ground, it was battered by fire and washed away by flash floods until only foundations and a cemetery remained. The ovens, set higher and built like fortresses, simply stayed. In the empty decades after, sheepherders and prospectors sheltered in them through storms. They sat on private ranchland until the state took them in, earned a place on the National Register in 1971, and became the small state park you can visit today.

It is a peaceful place to stop. The walk to the ovens is short and flat, the inside of each one cool and oddly resonant; the park at seven thousand feet also has a creekside campground, a few hiking trails, and some of the darkest night skies in the country, with the gate open around the clock for stargazers. Bring water, watch the unpaved road in wet weather, and come from Ely, twenty miles north, with a full tank. Of all the things the loneliest road asks you to drive out of your way for, these six silent ovens may be the one that stays with you longest.