The Cottonwood Charcoal Kilns: Smoke Across the Lake

Out across the white salt pan to your east, about a mile off the highway, two squat domes of plastered clay brick sit on the old shoreline of Owens Lake. These are the Cottonwood Charcoal Kilns, and they are the last standing relics of one of the strangest supply chains in the West: a lake that was once a working harbor.

The story begins with silver. High in the Inyo Mountains across the lake, the Cerro Gordo mines were pouring out wealth in the early 1870s, but Mortimer Belshaw's smelting furnaces had a problem. They devoured charcoal, and the Inyo slopes had been stripped of timber. The fuel had to come from somewhere else, and the somewhere was the well-watered Sierra to the west.

In June 1873 Colonel Sherman Stevens built a sawmill and a long V-flume up in Cottonwood Canyon, directly behind where you're standing. Logs rode the flume down to the lakeshore, where these kilns slow-baked the wood for roughly ten days into hard, hot-burning charcoal. The charcoal was carted to Stevens's Wharf and loaded onto the steamer Bessie Brady, a nearly 100-foot vessel that could carry around 200,000 pounds across the water, with the smaller Mollie Stevens helping out. On the far side at Keeler, mule teams hauled it up the brutal Yellow Grade road to the furnaces.

It was a closed loop: fuel went east, silver bullion came back west on Remi Nadeau's freight wagons bound for Los Angeles. That bullion helped bankroll the young city. The boom was brief. Cerro Gordo's richest ore played out by the late 1870s, the Bessie Brady burned in 1882, and the kilns fell silent.

Long before any of this, the Owens Valley Paiute, the Numu, lived along these shores and the freshwater marshes that the lake then fed, harvesting fish, waterfowl, and pinyon pine. The industry that built these kilns helped set in motion the displacement and water diversions that would eventually drain the lake you see today.