Gebo, in Hot Springs County north of Thermopolis, began in 1907 as a coal town near Crosby and Kirby. Named for Samuel Wilford Gebo, a Canadian immigrant who founded the Owl Creek Coal Company and opened the area’s first mine, it grew for decades on coal mining. At its height, more than 2,000 people, mostly miners and their families, lived there, briefly making it the county’s largest town. Mining lasted until 1938. Although most of the town was bulldozed in 1971, some buildings and the cemetery remain as traces of a once-thriving mining community.