39.036597° -114.847592°

The Ward Charcoal Ovens, located in the Egan Range of White Pine County, were constructed in 1876 to supply charcoal for the smelters serving the nearby Ward Mining District. Silver had been discovered in the Willow Creek Basin in 1872, and the resulting mining activity led the Martin & White Company of San Francisco to develop claims and build furnaces for processing the ore. The six surviving ovens are impressive beehive-shaped masonry structures, approximately 30 feet high and 27 feet in diameter, designed to convert pinyon pine and juniper into the high-temperature fuel required by the smelters. Each oven could hold roughly 35 cords of wood, which was burned under controlled conditions to produce charcoal. The ovens operated during Ward’s brief silver boom, from approximately 1876 to 1879. The charcoal industry ended as the Ward mines declined, timber became increasingly scarce, and alternative fuels such as coke became more practical for smelting. The ovens nevertheless survived remarkably well, later serving as occasional shelters for travelers, stockmen, and prospectors; local tradition also associated them with stagecoach bandits. After decades under private ownership, the site came under state protection and was ultimately incorporated into the Nevada State Park System. Ward Charcoal Ovens State Historic Park now preserves these structures as some of the finest surviving examples of nineteenth-century charcoal kilns in Nevada, illustrating both the industrial demands and the environmental costs of the state’s early mining boom.
-Nevada State Parks

It took a lot of charcoal for smelting operations

Lead-silver smelters at Eureka, Nevada, for example, ordinarily required about 30 bushels of charcoal to reduce one ton of ore; but during the concluding six weeks of 1872, Ruby Consolidated Co., at Eureka, used 59 bushels to each ton. For a three-month period in 1872, Bristol & Daggett Smelter at Bingham Canyon, Utah, also used 59 bushels to the ton; and Winnamuck Furnaces, in Utah, used charcoal to a value of $24.45 for every ton of ore smelted—56 percent of the entire cost of their smelting operation.
- Charcoal, The West's Forgotten Industry, NELL MURBARGER, Desert Magazine, June 1956

Nell Murbarger was impressed by the condition and the construction techniques back in 1956

Many of the old beehive kilns are still standing. The best ovens I have seen are those near the old ghost town of Ward, Nevada, 18 miles south of Ely. Six in number, these kilns are larger than average—being 30 feet in height, with a floor diameter of 27 feet, and walls two feet in thickness at the base. Five of the 80-year-old ovens are preserved perfectly, the top of the sixth showing some deterioration. Built of random stone, squarefaced to the exterior, with dressed stone forming the frames of the charge and discharge doors, the gracefullyarched stone roofs of these kilns—like those of most charcoal ovens—derive their sole support from the highly skillful manner in which their stones are fitted together. I doubt if many stone masons of today possess the masterly technique necessary to erect such a structure, completely without mortar or structural steel reinforcing—yet these fine old kilns have been standing solidly since shortly after the Civil War, and for more than 60 years of that time have known virtually no maintenance or repair.
- Charcoal, The West's Forgotten Industry, NELL MURBARGER, Desert Magazine, June 1956

Well-preservd "beehive" chacola kilns.