Upton: Irontown, Merino, and the Coal That Named a County

The town now called Upton has worn three names. It began as Irontown, named for Iron Creek, a supply stop and waypoint for cowboys and homesteaders drifting through Weston County in the late eighteen eighties. It was then called Merino, after the sheep that grazed the surrounding range. Then in eighteen ninety the Burlington Railroad laid a depot here near a set of sheep corrals, and the settlement reorganized itself around that anchor. Mail confusion with another Merino in Colorado led to a new name in nineteen oh one, Upton, for a railroad surveyor, and the town incorporated in nineteen oh nine.

Weston County itself owes its name and existence to a coal discovery. In eighteen eighty-seven, a man named John Weston and his partner Frank Mondell found coal seams in a nearby settlement called Cambria. That discovery prompted the creation of Weston County in eighteen ninety. Mondell went on to become Newcastle's first mayor. The Burlington Railroad extended north to Sheridan in eighteen ninety-two, establishing coal camps and company towns along the way. Upton sat at the intersection of cattle, sheep, coal, and rail, a small town that concentrated most of what made this corner of Wyoming run.