Gordon Wright’s “mud wagon” a lifeline to mining camps. His Centennial ranch becomes a community gathering spot
Wyoming’s Centennial Valley boasts many beautiful old ranch sites, but one of the most picturesque and historically significant is the Vee Bar Ranch. Its buildings snuggle among the trees in a curve of the Little Laramie River, north of Highway 130. The ranch is 22 miles west of Laramie and seven miles further is Centennial.
There were several owners of this ranch before Gordon Wright (1868-1931) and his wife Myra (1868-1941) began renting the land in 1903. It was well established as a cattle and horse ranch by then.
They weren’t alone in the Centennial Valley. Timber camps had been established in the Medicine Bow Mountains as soon as railroad and town building began in the Laramie area. Other mines and settlers in the Centennial Valley and the Medicine Bow Mountains followed. A gold mine had been discovered in the area in 1876, giving the name “Centennial” to the mine and the valley settlement.
Veteran stage wagon
Wright bought an old passenger wagon from Alvy Dickson in 1900. Ben Holladay’s 1862 stage line along the Overland Route through Bridger’s Pass may have been where the wagon was first used, in the days before the railroad. At the time, Holladay was the “Stage King” of the west, having established stage routes in California starting with the 1840s gold rush. Holladay sold his equipment and stage routes to Wells Fargo in 1866.
At the time Wright purchased the wagon it might have been only 30 or 40 years old, not an antique, though it had probably seen hard use. The Dicksons, who sold it to Wright, lived in “Rock Dale,” as the Arlington area of Carbon County was known then. They would have had long commutes to Rawlins or station stops along the railroad.
Wright renamed the stage wagon as his “mud wagon” to use in operating a passenger and freighting business from Laramie to the Holmes, Keystone, and New Rambler mines in the Snowy Range, as well as the lumber camps and other settlements along the way.
Plenty of scenery; arduous trip
Passengers who got on in Laramie might have had a six-hour stage ride to their destination. They would share the ride with all manner of people and freight in the topless wagon with wooden bench seats devoid of upholstery.
The Wright’s daughter, Agnes Wright Spring (1894-1988), wrote poetically in 1970 about the stage ride. She and her sister probably took many trips back and forth from the ranch to Laramie where they were boarding to attend school at the time of the 1910 census, when they were teenagers.
She described the “windswept plains on a two-rut dirt road with no house, no tree, not a foot of fencing, no telephone pole, no railway line. There was nothing but sky and plains rimed to the north and south by low-rolling hills, with Sheep and Bald Mountains and Snowy Range bulwarking the western horizon. Pine-topped Laramie Mountains with Pilot Knob were eastward.”
Although Agnes and her sister would have ended their ride at the ranch just east of Centennial, passengers going further would get off also for the noon meal at the ranch. Mrs. Wright became famous for her 35 cent meals cooked on the kitchen wood range.
Also eating the noon meal would be the regular stage crew and ranch hands, as well as the passengers. Those visitors might include geologists, miners, surveyors, financiers and fishermen eager to try their hand in the nearby Little Laramie River on the Wright’s ranch.
If passengers went on to Holmes with Gordon Wright, they would find the roads rough but passable, with no maintenance other than what the freighters and others had done to get around obstacles. In the winter, on packed snow, the ride was usually smoother, assuming locals got to work packing down new snowfalls. With the spring melt, the road became a muddy quagmire and the stage trips had to stop. It was big news when the road was finally declared to be “open” again as the mud dried out enough to travel by wagon.
A social center
Myra Wright kept the “Filmore” Post Office at the ranch, which served Centennial residents. Neighbors would come to get their mail, socialize, and have lunch. Even after the local railroad, the “Laramie, Hahns Peak and Pacific” (LHP&P, also known as the “Late Hard Pressed and Panicky” among other sobriquets), came to the Centennial Valley in 1907, the ranch continued as a social center; the stage line operated for a while afterward.
For 25 years, Mrs. Wright continued to operate the post office at her roll-top desk in the ranch dining room to serve the miners and residents of the valley. Many visitors stayed overnight and continued the stage ride to the mountains or mines the next day.
As daughter Agnes recalls, conversations at dinner and in the evenings ranged from talk of ranching and mining to the not-too-popular U.S. Forest Service and grazing fees—and on to “socialism.” Singing was popular evening entertainment, made more enjoyable with Mrs. Wright’s grand piano and enlivened further if a guest happened to have an instrument along.
There were taffy pulls, games of “Authors,” “High Five,” or “Hearts,” Agnes recalled, as well as listening to the graphophone or phonograph. She also mentions a big dance held in the hayloft of the barn that her dad had built in 1906.
Ranch activities
The ranch wasn’t just a stage stop; it was also a working ranch with employees. Matt Bower from Ireland ran the blacksmith shop. He had been blacksmith at Rawhide Buttes on the old Cheyenne and Black Hills Trail.
The “Vee Bar” was Gordon Wright’s registered cattle brand. During his years at the ranch he raised cattle, sheep and horses, as Catherine Wiegand wrote in her 1976 book “Centennial, Wyoming 1876-1976,” available at Coe Library, along with a 1996 revised edition by several local Centennial authors. Although the place was known as “Filmore” for the post office, it also became the Vee Bar Ranch, which is how it is known today.
The Wrights had four daughters, Agnes, Lucile, Rachel and Alice. Agnes, the oldest, became a published writer. She describes the ranch as a “wonderful home that stood near the bank of the Little Laramie, bordered by willows, alders, wild roses, currants, and cottonwoods.” She remembered fondly the “massive dark logs contrasted with colorful white chinking” of the main house, which is how it still looks today.
The girls found campfire sites, tepee rings, arrowheads, a stone spearhead, and buffalo skulls in the ranch fields, indicating previous use of the area by American Indian tribes for hunting.
Changes come
The short but ambitiously named LHP&P Railroad finally reached what became its final destination, Coalmont, Colorado, in 1911. This steam-powered passenger and freight rail service to the mining and lumbering outposts of the Snowy Range doomed the stage line.
Wright, however, realized that the ranch was a destination in itself that could become popular with tourists. An article in the Laramie Boomerang on May 17, 1900, says “A carload of lumber will be shipped to Gordon Wright at Filmore next Monday to be used in adding a second story to his already commodious residence on the ranch.
“It is Mr. Wright’s plan to enlarge his house so that he can engage in the profitable occupation of ‘dude herding’ [sic]. In other words, he will keep summer boarders from the east or from Laramie. His proximity to fine scenery and the best of fishing guarantee that his venture will be successful. The Centennial Valley already has a reputation as an ideal summer resort,” the paper concluded.
This dude ranching operation continues to be a significant part of the Vee Bar operation today, made all the more enjoyable for the historic buildings and the tradition of hospitality of the Wright’s ownership and that of earlier and current owners.
Early history of the Vee Bar
Before the Wrights purchased the ranch in 1911 after renting it starting in 1903, the Albany County Tract Index book shows that the patent deed to 320 acres was granted to Theodore Bruback in 1891. Patent deeds are the original grant from the federal government to corporations or individuals. In 1886, Bruback had “squatted” on the land where he built a cabin and barns. He also dug irrigation ditches, which were important for the prosperity of the cattle and horse ranching operations that followed.
Lionel Charles George Sartoris, an Englishman, acquired the property around 1890 (even though Bruback’s patent was not granted until 1891) as part of the Douglas-Willan Sartoris Ranch Company with his partner John H. Douglas-Willan. It was a vast but short-lived ranching enterprise of over 120,000 acres of deeded land valued at $2 million, including the home ranch and six smaller ranches. The Centennial Valley property was mainly occupied by Sartoris for raising thoroughbred and Shire draft stallions; there also were some mining interests and Hereford cattle production, which required that more irrigation ditches be constructed.
The Company, typical of several in the area founded by wealthy Englishmen, enjoyed a few spectacular years. General Manager, George Morgan, was one of the first to introduce Herefords to the west. The ranch home was known as one of the largest and most beautiful in the area.
The classic 1955 book, “Wyoming’s Pioneer Ranches” by Burns, Gillespie and Richardson, mentions that the ranch buildings were extensive, with many dating before 1900, including bunkhouses, horse barns, buggy sheds, a cookhouse, carpenter shop and other buildings. More information is in “From Foxhounds to Farming,” a 1995 UW Master’s thesis by Amy Lawrence on the Douglas-Willan Sartoris Company.
However, financial difficulties plagued the over-extended Sartoris; he defaulted on a $6,000 note to Susan Fillmore, who took possession of the property in Centennial. The Douglas-Willan Sartoris Company declared bankruptcy in 1892.
In 1870, Susan’s husband Luther was superintendent in the Laramie area for the Union Pacific Railroad and he quickly became involved in ranching. He was one of the first officers of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association at its founding in 1871. Although Susan and Luther Fillmore mainly lived in Laramie, they used the ranch for summer outings and for invited guests. More irrigation ditches were built in their tenure, and that of their son James, who took over ownership when his father died in 1907, though by that time the Wrights were renting the ranch.
When the post office and stage stop was established at the ranch, somehow the extra “L” in the former owner’s name “Fillmore” was often dropped and it became “Filmore” in the postal records and in the newspaper. Typical was a story in the Laramie Republican of March 12, 1914, titled: “Sending Elk to Filmore” about a carload of elk from Jackson, Wyoming that were to be let loose at Filmore in hopes of “populating the area like it was before.”
By Jessie Springer
Source: Pioneer Museum, Douglas, WY
Caption: Gordon Wright’s “Mud Wagon,” a veteran of his freighting and stage service in the Snowy Range. Probably built by the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire or one of the spin-off carriage makers of that town. Abbot-Downing made high-end custom stagecoaches but also supplied a much simpler, sturdier, and less expensive vehicle named the Overland Wagon, according to Ken Wheeling, in “They Called Them ‘Mudders,’” published in a 2005 issue of The Carriage Journal. Ben Holladay purchased these for his stage operations in California and on the Overland Trail; each cost at least $525 in 1871. Since it had no top, it is a passenger wagon rather than a coach, though it could have been ordered with a canvas top. Possibly the hoops on the back wall were like those that once might have supported a cloth roof. This one was donated by the Wright family to the Pioneer Museum and is shown as it is now on exhibit in Douglas. It might be noted that this wagon is a bit like George Washington’s proverbial axe, which had “three new handles and two new heads,” in that new owners may have supplied or removed many of the wagon parts