Historic Spots & Monuments

The Carbon cemetery has been in use since 1868, when the town of Carbon was founded next to coal mines on the Union Pacific Railroad. The town has long been a ghost town, but interest in the cemetery revived in 2002, when a local association began refurbishing it and researching the lives of the people buried there.

The Ames Monument, a 60-foot-high granite pyramid, was completed in 1882 at the highest point on the Union Pacific Railroad, to honor railroad financiers Oakes and Oliver Ames. The tracks have since been moved, but the monument is still easily visible and accessible from Interstate 80 between Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyo.

Alcova Dam, a Bureau of Reclamation project, was completed in 1937. The reservoir opened in 1938 and a power plant was completed in 1955. The $20 million dam project didn’t achieve the high expectations of immense wealth that were forecast at the time of its inception, but continues to provide irrigation water for farmers and ranchers and generates hydropower for the area. Alcova Reservoir offers fishing, boating, camping and swimming opportunities for visitors.

The Casper Army Air Base was built quickly in 1942 to train bomber crews for World War II combat. The facility trained more than 16,000 men before the end of the war. Its population grew to a third of the size of Casper’s, bringing prosperity and a lively social life to the town. The base closed in 1945, when the war ended.

From 1942 through most of 1945, about 10,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast of United States lived behind barbed wire in tarpaper barracks at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center between Cody and Powell, Wyo. in Park County—one of ten such camps around the nation during World War II. The center was briefly Wyoming’s third-largest town. When hundreds of young men in the camp were drafted into the U.S. military, 63 resisted, feeling they had been denied their constitutional rights. They and seven more leaders of the group were sentenced to federal prison. In the 1980s, Congress passed a law granting an apology and $20,000 to every survivor of the camps.