To call once-booming Castle Gate a ghost town is a bit of an overstatement. Even the buildings are gone, taking with them stories of payroll holdups, mining disasters and the day-to-day happenings of a Roaring '20s Utah coal town.
But one asset of Castle Gate remains - the cemetery. And now it will remain a testament for generations to come.Blackhawk Coal Co. has deeded to Carbon County the Castle Gate cemetery, along with several acres of adjoining land. The county will assume responsibility for maintaining the cemetery, and the Utah Department of Transportation has agreed to construct a highway pullout along U.S. 191 next to the cemetery.
"Cemeteries have so much to tell us," said Pam Miller, archaeologist for the College of Eastern Utah. "It tells us who the people are, where they came from."
And how they died.
Like the mine explosion at Utah Fuel Co. Mine No. 2 that killed 171 miners and one rescue worker on March 8, 1924. Most are buried in Castle Gate.
Written between the lines on the various tombstones is another tragedy: One month before, the Utah Fuel Co. had begun laying off miners because of falling prices. But officials had laid off the men who were single.
"The thinking was that the married men had families to support and they would be laid off last," said Miller, who has been researching historic cemeteries.
As a result, twice as many married men as single men were killed in the explosion.
The cemetery also reveals the stark evidence of the infamous "flu epidemic of 1918," which struck Castle Gate in 1919.
Above all, the cemetery sheds light on the ethnic and religious diversity of Utah coal towns. English, Welsh, Scots, Greeks, Italians, Austrians (really Yugoslavians, Miller says), Belgians, Japanese, blacks and Mormons are all buried here.
"That's the thing that makes this cemetery so important," Miller said. "The thing that makes it eligible for national register is that it is the only thing left of the entire community. The buildings were all moved to Helper and Spring Canyon (both in Carbon County)."
Besides the cemetery, all that remains are newspaper accounts, like the 1897 article describing "the bold, bad highwaymen . . . Tom Gissell and Butch Cassidy," who robbed the Pleasant Valley Coal paymaster of $7,000 in gold in front of nearly 100 witnesses at the Castle Gate train depot.
But the depot is gone. So are the coal company and the Wasatch Company Store.
So County Commissioner Emma Kuykendall approached the current owners of the property about acquiring the cemetery. Blackhawk Coal, a subsidiary of American Electric Power Service Corp., responded by deeding the cemetery to the county for $1.
"I can't say how important this is to the people of Carbon County," Kuykendall said. "About every older person in Carbon County has a relative buried there. This is our heritage, and we need to preserve it."
"Historically, when a community has requested land, we try to work with them," said R. Chandler Nowicki, staff attorney for American Electric.
Blackhawk has also leased nine acres immediately adjacent to the cemetery to the state Division of Oil Gas and Mining for storage of coal wastes that will be stabilized and covered with dirt.
Castle Gate is on the Price River and was first established in 1883 with the arrival of a railroad. The town was, from the beginning, a coal town, making it subject to fluctuations in coal market prices.
By the 1950s, the town once labeled Utah's most important coal camp had died.