Gillette: Energy Capital of the Nation

Gillette began as a railroad town in eighteen ninety-one, named for Edward Gillette, a surveyor for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. For the first eight decades it was a modest ranching and rail stop. Then the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies changed everything.

The Powder River Basin holds the largest coal seams in North America, close to the surface and miles wide, and the Clean Air Act of nineteen seventy created sudden demand for the Basin's low-sulfur coal. Gillette exploded. The city's population grew by roughly two thirds in a decade, and the social strain of that overnight growth gave rise to what sociologists called Gillette Syndrome, a much-debated theory of community dysfunction associated with extreme boom-town development.

Today Gillette produces more coal than any other county in the United States.