GREEN RIVER — A parent, an uncle, a cousin or a friend. If you don’t work out in the trona mines, someone you know does.

Trona has shaped life in Sweetwater County for nearly 80 years. According to Dick Blust, Museum Services Specialist at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, West Virginia Chlorine Products, known as Westvaco, sank the first mine shaft west of Green River in 1946, followed by Stauffer Chemical in 1962, Allied Chemical in 1968, Texasgulf International in 1976 and Tenneco Minerals in 1982. 

Those companies are long gone, absorbed through decades of mergers and buyouts, but the mines they built are still running, some even at the same address. According to the Wyoming State Inspector of Mines’ 2025 annual report, four mines currently operate in the county: Solvay’s American Soda mine, Sisecam Wyoming, Tata Chemicals (Soda Ash) Partners, and We Soda, whose Green River mine still sits on Westvaco Road, named for the company that started it all.

Employment in the county’s trona mines has stayed remarkably steady over the past several years even as production has swung with the market. State inspector reports show trona employment at 2,225 workers in 2018, climbing to 2,311 in 2019, dipping to 2,290 in 2020 during the pandemic, and holding in the 2,250 to 2,400 range every year since, landing at 2,296 employees in 2025.

Walk into any grocery store or ball field in Green River or Rock Springs, and odds are you’re standing near someone whose family has been going underground for decades. Grandfathers trained their sons on mining equipment, and those sons trained their own kids on the same machines, sometimes on the very same crew. Kids who grew up hearing their dad or grandpa talk about shift work at the dinner table often end up down there themselves, chasing the same steady paycheck and the same tight-knit crews that looked out for their own parents a generation before.

The industry’s reach goes well beyond any one family or company name. Sweetwater County holds the largest, most easily mineable trona deposit known anywhere in the world, and in 1989 Gov. Mike Sullivan proclaimed the county the Trona Capital of the World.

For generations of families here, the mines have meant steady paychecks, shift schedules that shape daily life, and jobs passed down from parent to child.