Joliet: Carbon County Shipping Point

Joliet came into existence in eighteen ninety-two when the Rocky Fork and Cook City Railway laid track through the Clarks Fork valley to connect the Red Lodge coal district with the main Northern Pacific line to the north. The railroad needed a shipping point at this location, and the town grew up around that function on land filed by early homesteaders. By eighteen ninety-six the settlement had a post office, four stores, three saloons, two hotels, and about a hundred residents, the classic profile of a western railroad service town.

Carbon County itself had been created in eighteen ninety-five and named for the coal seams underlying the region. Joliet incorporated in eighteen ninety-nine, when civic organizers platted a formal town. The surrounding Clarks Fork valley became prosperous sugar-beet and grain country in the twentieth century, and Joliet settled into the quiet agricultural life that most of Carbon County's small towns eventually found after the coal boom faded.