The story
Cochran was a small mining and railroad camp on the Gila River, settled in 1905 and named for its first postmaster, John Cochran. It served as a stop on the railroad now known as the Copper Basin line and supported perhaps a hundred people, with a store and a boarding house.
Its lasting monuments stand across the river: a row of five beehive-shaped stone coke ovens, each roughly 25 feet across and 30 feet tall. Built to slow-burn mesquite into coke for smelting gold and silver ore, they outlasted the town by more than a century. The post office closed in 1915 and Cochran itself dissolved back into the desert.
What remains today
The five stone beehive coke ovens on the far bank of the Gila; the townsite proper is gone to foundations and scatter.
Questions from the field
- What are the coke ovens at Cochran?
- Five beehive-shaped stone ovens built to bake mesquite wood into coke, a hotter fuel for smelting ore. They stand across the Gila River from the vanished townsite and are the main reason people still seek Cochran out.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
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Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 24373
- — Wikipedia — Cochran, Arizona
- — Butte-Cochran charcoal ovens (National Register of Historic Places)