Piedmont began in the 1860s as a logging camp supplying ties for the approaching Union Pacific Railroad and as a base camp for graders building the railroad bed over nearby Aspen Mountain. As more people arrived to work in railroad and logging operations, it grew into a thriving community with a general store, hotel, school, post office, and several saloons. Among the first settlers were the Moses Byrne family and the Charles Guild family, and the town was first named Byrne before being renamed Piedmont by Mrs. Byrne and Mrs. Guild, sisters from Piedmont, Italy, to avoid confusion with nearby Bryan. In 1868, the railroad reached Piedmont, and in 1869 Moses Byrne built conical charcoal kilns of local sandstone and limestone to supply fuel for Utah's iron smelting industry, using timber from the nearby Uinta Mountains. Workers filled the kilns with pine logs, controlled airflow through vent holes, and slowly fired the wood for six to eight days before cooling it for another five days to make charcoal that was shipped to ore smelters in Utah's Salt Lake Valley and to Fort Bridge for blacksmith forges. The town also figured in local legend: in 1896 Butch Cassidy met his gang there before the Montpelier, Idaho bank robbery, and Calamity Jane apparently lived there as a young girl. Piedmont's fortunes were tied to the railroad, and around 1901 the line was rerouted a few miles north through the Aspen Tunnel, bypassing the town and ending its economical transport link. Without the railroad, the logging and charcoal businesses collapsed, and although Piedmont lingered on until the 1940s, when the Guild Mercantile Store closed for lack of business, only remnants of homes, the kilns, and cemeteries remain.