There was a different look to Laramie streets before automobiles. Where the trains didn’t go, horses provided transportation until autos finally took over.

A Wyoming Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol went into effect on June 30, 1919. About six months later the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became effective. In 15 years of Prohibition, Wyoming’s most heinous crime of the entire era happened in Albany County.

It’s hard to imagine the excitement when the Ringling Bros. train with over 40 cars pulled into Laramie. The town and countryside had been plastered with billboards months in advance. Its spectacle of July 30, 1909 left everyone talking for years.

Laramie’s first bowling alley was in the “Theatre Saloon” leased by Charles Kuster on First St. For a few months in 1870 he advertised “Two good ten-pin alleys, free to patrons of the bar.”

In pre-1900 Laramie, women with time on their hands visited each other in very prescribed ways. It might do for some to visit over the back fence while hanging up laundry, but that was the maid’s job in many Laramie homes. For genteel Laramie women, casual meetings happened in churches and stores, but a visit in someone’s home was covered by much more rigid customs.

Once there were 24 different school districts in Albany County. They offered whatever classes were needed at over 300 locations in the county. However, not all were active at the same time. District #1 served the city of Laramie with several school buildings, but also operated 11 rural schools. The other 23 rural districts in Albany County ranged all the way from Esterbrook in the north (now part of Converse County) to Mountain Home on the Colorado border.

Albany County is one of seven counties in Wyoming where all the various school districts are now combined into one for elementary education. Rural and city schools are under the same umbrella. But it wasn’t always that way.

Medicine Peak quartzite started as quartz sand, became sandstone, and then was metamorphosed under intense pressure to its final form—very hard rock that sparkles in the sun. Yet even with this major transformation, the quartzite still provides clues about its ancient birthplace

For centuries countries have named their warships. Names have included adjectives such as the United Kingdom’s HMS Invincible. Other choices have been for fierce battles such as the U.S. Navy’s USS Tarawa and for prominent people; the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier is an example. In the U.S. Navy, the most powerful ships of the day have been honored with the names of states. In the case of Wyoming, there have been three such ships that have been christened for the State of Wyoming

The first few years after WWII were no ordinary time for Laramie and Wyoming. Weddings proliferated and so did a baby boom, though both had begun earlier as the pre-war buildup ended the Great Depression. Cynics said that men who became fathers during the war were hoping to avoid the draft—a ploy that did not work for most. As the war dragged on, married men with children were drafted or called up too.

The Laramie Plains Museum (LPM) has photos by at least seventeen different photographers who worked between the late 1860s and 1900; most lived in Laramie for a time. The earliest known photographers to capture Laramie travelled the newly built Union Pacific Railroad. They recorded emerging towns as they popped up with the arrival of the railroad; many are ghost towns today. These early photos are an invaluable testament to the settlement of the west. Two well-known early photographers were Andrew J. Russell (1829-1902) and Arundel C. Hull (1849-1909).

Until the erection of the first men’s dormitory in 1928 (now called McWhinnie Hall), the existence of a boarding clubs and then a University Commons for daily meals continued to play a significant role in helping out-of-town male students to integrate into the community and university, develop long-lasting social relationships, and persist to graduation.

A rancher and his wife living northeast of Laramie set out by foot on a nice March day for supplies. They had no way of knowing a blizzard was looming.

Methods had improved by the 1800s, when the young United States was acquiring large chunks of unknown territory. Maps by William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) and Charles Preuss (John C. Frémont's cartographer) added significantly to our geological knowledge. But they weren't perfect. Clark put today's Colorado too far north, thereby eliminating the Laramie Plains and much of southern Wyoming. Preuss's map was accurate for major features, but finer details could be unreliable, as we saw on the Laramie Plains.

In the spring of 1893, Albany County Surveyor W.O. Owen received a set of maps from the US Geological Survey for review. Owen had known what to expect, but the others who viewed them were surprised. "The maps are of a very interesting character ...", wrote a reporter for the Laramie Boomerang, "almost every hill and cañon can be determined at a glance!"

We may think that this year will be a “downer” but compared to the difficulties of being cheerful in some holidays past, there may be more room for optimism for us. In my sample of Wyoming December newspapers, editors try to be upbeat for the holidays, no matter what the circumstances, but some years are exceptions.

Until the decade from 1910 to 1920, it was unthinkable that American women would wear their hair cut short. Nor was it at all proper for women to go out in public without wearing a hat. Styles in millinery accommodated whatever the hair styles dictated.

A colorful cardboard box in the Laramie Plains Museum (LPM) collection is labeled “Kickapoo Indian Guide to Health and Longevity.” It’s not clear what was originally in the box; it did have some cut-outs of “Indians,” their horses, tents and blankets that would have appealed to children. Possibly it once had some of the “herbs, barks and roots” advertised on the box as remedies. Turns out that the Kickapoo herbal concoction was made in New Haven, Connecticut; there was nothing “Indian” about it except the name. There is a real Kickapoo tribe that ultimately landed on an Oklahoma reservation, but it gave no medical secrets to the New Haven company.

Airmail comes to America. In January 1920, the USPS announced plans for a coast-to-coast service, following existing routes to Chicago, then railroad tracks from Chicago to Omaha. In Omaha, the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) tracks would be used to San Francisco. Flying would be done in daylight hours, as pilots had no navigational devices and had to see landmarks like the tracks, which pilots called their “iron compass.”