PARKS & RECREATION
Key Assets: Weston County’s origins are genuinely rooted in the ghost coal-mining town of CAMBRIA, discovered in 1887 by John Weston and Frank Mondell (the county is named for Weston, a geologist and surveyor) – by 1890, the Cambria coal camp employed 750 people with a population of 1,500 residents representing 23 different nationalities, making it a remarkably diverse frontier community for its era; Cambria thrived for roughly 40 years supplying coal to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, with around 150 homes built for mining families, before the coal veins ran out and the town’s whistle blew for the final time on March 15, 1928, leaving it entirely abandoned – many residents left possessions and store products behind in their rush to find new work; the nearby Cambria Casino (also known as Flying V Guest Ranch), a Tudor Revival lodge built in 1927 by New York architect Bruce Rabenold, survives today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the county seat, Newcastle, founded in 1889 and named after “Newcastle-on-Tyne,” England (the hometown of Cambria’s mine superintendent), was built up by the Kilpatrick Brothers and Collins Construction Company, whose historic Antlers Hotel remains in operation today; on April 25, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt personally visited Newcastle, drawing over 2,000 people to Main Street during his eight-week, 262-speech tour of the American West; the ANNA MILLER MUSEUM, housed in a 1930s WPA-built sandstone stable listed on the National Register of Historic Places (1994), displays Cambria coal camp artifacts, a one-room schoolhouse, dinosaur fossils, and period rooms, and is named for Newcastle’s first librarian; the Weston County Fairgrounds hosts the annual, internationally known Perino Horse Sale each June
Notes: Cambria’s genuine status as a thriving, remarkably diverse coal-mining boomtown – with 23 nationalities represented before its total abandonment in 1928 – combined with Theodore Roosevelt’s real 1903 visit to Newcastle, make Weston County a distinctive and well-documented piece of Wyoming’s frontier industrial history.