Evanston: The Railroad Town That Burned Its Own History

Evanston exists because of the Union Pacific Railroad, and it carries that identity in almost every building downtown. The town is even named for James A. Evans, a Union Pacific civil engineer who surveyed the route through this corner of Wyoming in eighteen sixty-eight. When the rails arrived, the railroad brought Chinese immigrant workers, first to build the line, then to maintain it and work the nearby coal mines.

By the eighteen seventies, a substantial Chinese community had taken root across the tracks from the main town in a neighborhood everyone called Chinatown. At its height in the eighteen eighties, it held several dozen residences, a community hall, and most notably a temple that the white population referred to as the Joss House, built in eighteen seventy-four. The community staged elaborate Lunar New Year celebrations with dragon parades through downtown and fireworks, vivid color in a frontier railroad town that otherwise ran on coal dust and schedule boards.

The census of eighteen eighty counted more than one hundred Chinese residents in a town of twelve hundred people, a proportion almost unmatched in Wyoming outside of Rock Springs. That community endured the anti-Chinese violence of the eighteen eighties, the Rock Springs massacre of eighteen eighty-five sent reverberations through every Chinese enclave in the territory, but Evanston's Chinatown survived into the twentieth century.

In nineteen twenty-two, the Union Pacific set fire to Chinatown. The official rationale was clearing tax and ownership records. Whatever the true motivation, the fire consumed the neighborhood, and most of the remaining Chinese residents left, many of them returning to China.

Archaeologists excavating the site in recent years have recovered more than three hundred thousand artifacts: ceramics, coins, medicines, personal effects, tools. The objects survived where the buildings did not. They are now among the most significant collections documenting Chinese railroad worker life in the American West.

Evanston also anchors one of the most intact railroad roundhouses in the country. The twenty-eight-stall brick roundhouse built in nineteen twelve served as the chief locomotive repair facility on the Union Pacific main line between Ogden and Green River. Of roughly three thousand roundhouses ever built in the United States, only about two hundred survive, and fewer than a dozen are as complete as this one.