Ward Charcoal Ovens: Six Stone Beehives

About twenty miles south of Ely, a canyon road leads to one of the most striking industrial artifacts in Nevada. The Ward Charcoal Ovens are six massive stone structures, each thirty feet tall and twenty-seven feet in diameter, built in eighteen seventy-six and eighteen seventy-seven to produce fuel for silver smelters in the nearby Ward Mining District. They stand in excellent repair in the canyon where they were built, and they look like nothing else in the state.

The ovens were the work of Swiss-Italian masons known as carbonari, craftsmen who specialized in building this type of kiln and brought the technique from the alpine regions of Europe to the mining districts of the American West. Workers packed each oven with wood cut from the surrounding pinon pine and juniper forests, sealed the iron doors, and controlled the burn over many days until the wood was converted to charcoal. The charcoal was then hauled to the smelters, where it provided the intense, controllable heat needed to process silver ore.

The Ward silver mines were a brief operation. By the end of the eighteen seventies the ovens had fallen silent. They survived the following century because they were too solid to demolish easily and too remote to bother. They were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one and now anchor Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park. Six stone structures built a hundred and fifty years ago in a White Pine County canyon, still standing, their interior walls still showing the scorched record of their working lives.