The Cambria Fuel Company, founded by the Kilpatrick Brothers and Collins, began mining coal in Cambria, Wyoming, on December 4, 1889, and continued until it closed on April 1, 1928. Cambria was a successful coal mining town for decades, located 8 miles north of Newcastle, Wyoming, on Little Oil Creek, later renamed Cambria Creek. In 1923, the company began constructing Cambria Park and its facilities, creating a small resort completed in 1928 at a cost of more than $250,000.00 on 2,280 acres donated by the company. The park included the Cambria Park Casino, salt water and freshwater swimming ponds with bath houses, a museum, an 18-hole golf course, and landscaped areas for picnicking and lounging. Located 8.2 miles north of Newcastle along U.S. Highway 85 in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, the route was then known as the International Highway and also called Newcastle, Deadwood Road. Cambria Park was never intended to be privately owned. After the coal ran out and the mines closed, the company sold the property to the Cambria Park Commissioners. The facility survived until 1932, when the commissioners began leasing it, first to The Flying V Ranch, later in 1939 to Reno Livestock Company, and also to the Pentecostal Church for use as a bible camp. During World War II, the facility was unable to pay its taxes, and Weston County sold it for taxes. In 1946, the Cambria Park Commissioners sued the Weston County Commissioners over property taxes, arguing that taxes should not apply because the property was leased to a religious group for education and religious purposes. The courts determined that Cambria Park was earning money from leases and was not itself carrying out the religious education and activities, and the Wyoming Supreme Court decided in favor of Weston County on 11/19/1946. On May 9, 1949, the Commissioners of Cambria Park sold the land to A.P. Joyce, Ann Miller, George Lake, and Glenn Pruitt of South Dakota. The property was described as Cambria Park and sometimes mistakenly called Flying V Ranch, which may explain why the site came to be known as The Flying V. The Cambria Park Casino was an authentic lodge of wood and stone with a kitchen, dining hall, chapel, museum, dance floor, and large open rooms, and the word casino referred to an attractive place for entertainment rather than gambling. Over time, the facility was used as a bible camp, a dude ranch, for ranching, as a bed and breakfast, and as a gathering place for hunters, weddings, family reunions, holiday gatherings, conventions, dances, and other events. Cambria Park also had both salt water and freshwater swimming areas, including the Cambria Salt Plunge with a diving tower, diving boards, bath houses, and picnic tables and seats around the pools. The ladies' bath house was completed in July 1926; it was sixty feet long, and forty-six feet of it contained forty-one booths. The plunge also saw tragedy when Arthur Giles, a seventeen-year-old high school junior, drowned there; people from Cambria and Newcastle raced to the park to save him, and Robert Spurgeon located his body immediately, but efforts to revive him failed. Cambria Park's golf course, called Garden of the Gods, was located on the hillside across the saltwater creek. It was an eighteen-hole course that hosted many annual tournaments involving participants from Deadwood, South Dakota, Edgemont, South Dakota, and elsewhere. The foundation and some walls of the club house remain, and the structure of a few of the eighteen holes is still visible.