Cambria: Wyoming's Company Town Under the Coal

Cambria, Wyoming was a company coal town that sprang from the Black Hills foothills in eighteen eighty-nine and vanished just as completely when the coal ran out in nineteen twenty-eight. The Cambria Fuel Company, backed by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, sank the first shaft after coal deposits were identified in eighteen eighty-seven. At its peak the mine employed roughly seven hundred workers from many different nations.

At its height the company claimed about fourteen hundred residents and supported a hospital, three churches, an opera house, and one hundred fifty homes. When the main coal seam thinned to less than three feet, the mine closed in March of nineteen twenty-eight. The town emptied over the following years and was not fully dismantled until World War Two.

Almost nothing remains above ground today except the memory of an unlikely city that existed entirely because of one mineral and disappeared entirely without it.