Grocers aim to please– Laramie had fresh oysters in 1876
From 1868 to 1890, Laramie’s first 22 years, there were over 40 different grocery, bakery, and meat market proprietors. This estimate is based on newspaper advertisements. Most stores were in the four blocks of 2nd St., from University to Custer.
Although not in Laramie proper, the first were Rusk and Shields grocery store, and the Star Bakery. Both were in Dale City, at the site of a huge railroad trestle under construction. They advertised on March 6, 1868 in the Frontier Index. The tracks reached Laramie two months later.
Those first two stores slipped away, but others soon appeared. Edward Ivinson began his grocery in the vicinity of 217 S. 2nd St. possibly as early as February, 1868. Another that first year was operated by three men–W. Pendleton, W.S. Millard and A. Knott. Pacific (meat) Market began in 1868 with ranchers Charles Hutton and Ora Haley as proprietors. By 1878 Robert Marsh and Frank Cooper had taken it over. The brick building at 211 S. 2nd St. they had built is still standing.
Also in 1868, L.T. Wilcox set up a general store at the corner of what is now a bank parking lot at Ivinson and 2nd St. In 1870, “Col.” Noah C. Worth began a grocery store nearby. The Sentinel newspapers in early May, 1870 mentioned grocers and butchers Strauss & Co., Whipple Brothers, M.G. Tonn, H.H. Richards, Hutton & Co., and Aaron T. Williams, owner of the Eagle Bakery.
Grocery stores sold mainly packaged, canned and bottled goods, with bins of milled grains, spices, sugar, dairy, fruits and vegetables Meat markets were usually separate businesses, but sometimes they also had produce. Selling meat required trained butchers and the markets were often associated with ranchers who had slaughter houses close to town–as in the case of Charles Hutton who had a ranch outside Laramie in addition to a meat market in town.
In the early 1870s, there were three other meat markets as well as Hutton’s. On November 26, 1872, the Sentinel announced that Edward Ivinson had sold his grocery store which would henceforth be called “Clark and Heimrod’s” grocery. Other grocery proprietors who began in the decade of the 1870s include H.H. Richards, C.H. Bussard, Dawson & Bro., Peter Holt, Channing S. Dunbar, Alfred Peabody, Henry Wagner, Mark Jennings, and Fred Prahl.
In 1884 “Swain & Little’s” grocery opened but closed the following year. Alfred G. Swain was a Laramie public school clerk and notary in 1870, his parents, Louisa and Stephen, came to Laramie for a while to help with Hattie and Alfred’s children. While in Laramie, Louisa Swain happened to be the first woman to cast a ballot after Wyoming’s 1869 law giving women full voting rights. The elder Swains left Laramie soon after Louisa’s historic vote in 1870, their son and family left in 1875.
New to Laramie in the 1880s were grocers John Quann, J. G. Brockway, and a grocery named “Chase & Miller’s. The W.H. Holliday department store began selling groceries in the late 1880s. Charles Yund and two brothers named “Brown” operated meat markets. The Laramie Co-op Grocery began around 1884 and lasted nearly 15 years at 321 S. 2nd St. The Co-op building burned in the 1948 fire that destroyed the entire block south to Custer St. A new building there now houses The Sugar Mouse Cupcake House.
Shopping was done differently than it is today. Housewives or their maids might stop in the store daily but they only carried home small items. Grocery stores were not self-service. Instead, a clerk fetched everything ordered, and a delivery man with his horse-drawn wagon brought it to the home. He usually put perishables directly in the ice box on the back porch and put the rest in the pantry (if permitted).
Some proprietors sent well-stocked grocery wagons to patrol the town. Bells on the teams gave residents time to hail them. In 1870, Laramie grocer H.H. Richards was lauded in the Laramie Sentinel for arranging things “so that the ladies, when they want anything in the grocery line, need only to signal his delivery wagon, as it goes cruising about town, order whatever they want and it will be put down at their door, and no extra charge.”
Dairy goods were also delivered to the home, usually a standing order through the dairy itself. In Laramie’s first 25 years, Catherine Mary Erhardt, known as “Milk Mary,” delivered almost daily from her original 1868 herd of six dairy cows; she expanded the herd size later. Other ranchers also supplied dairy products but didn’t advertise in newspapers, so their names are missing here. One that did exist before 1900 was “Wyoming Creamery” with 150 cows. It was started in 1895 by rancher Ora Haley, according to a Boomerang article on July 13, 1895.
At first, transactions were often on credit, with the householder theoretically going to the store weekly or monthly to pay. However, on Jan. 14, 1876, Channing S. Dunbar advertised that henceforth he would do a cash only business because he had $30,000 outstanding in unpaid bills and he would have to carry the “greater portion of this for three to six months.” He explained: “Here is where the evil of the credit system comes in; it is not that there are so many who do not pay, but because they are so slow in paying. No goods will leave the store unless paid for.”
A little over two years later Dunbar drowned in Hutton Lake. His father sold the grocery business to Alfred S. Peabody who had just arrived back in the U.S. with his family after a long stay in South Africa. Although he was a record keeper for a shipping firm that he and his older brother had operated, Peabody quickly adapted to the wholesale and retail grocery business (see photo).
Though we think that there were not as many foodstuffs to purchase 150 years ago as there are now, some of the foods advertised are remarkable. In 1876, bakery operator A.T. Williams (whose name is still at the top of his building at 210 S. 2nd) was among those advertising fresh figs and other fruit from California–and “fresh oysters.”
Having “oyster plates” was a mark of luxury. Those belonging to the Ivinson family can be seen today on display in their home, now a museum. Oysters could be kept alive and shipped by rail. A 2021 article titled “How Oysters Became a Food Fad Way Out West,” by Matthew Wills, describes how live oysters packed in barrels with salt water could stay “wholesome for a month or two.” This delicacy became a booming business in Cheyenne in 1867, but by 1910 the fad was over, says Wills.
Many Laramie grocers had both a wholesale and retail trade. Orders could be telegraphed to wholesalers in Denver or Omaha, and rail cars of goods reached Laramie quickly. The local stores then sold them to others, delivered as needed via stage coaches, wagons, or freighters to outlying ranches and other stores.
Experienced freighters Augustus (“Gus”) and Charles Trabing arrived in Laramie in 1868 and began a string of general stores, starting with Laramie and Medicine Bow, according to Nancy Trabing Mickelson, a great-granddaughter of Augustus. She says they expanded to Rawlins, then to a way station on the Bozeman Trail. They also established the first store in Buffalo, Wyoming. In the 1880s they began selling off their northern outlets and concentrated on Laramie.
In 1883, the Trabings greatly expanded their local grocery business with a large store at 318-320 S. 2nd St., the site of Altitude Restaurant today. Two years later, Charles Trabing died. At the time the firm had about 50 employees. It continued with Gus, who produced a grocery mail order catalog in 1888 (recently republished by Nancy Mickelson). The store burned completely in 1895.
The preservation of perishable food was done in the home with canning, smoking, drying and brining. Commercial canneries supplied fruits, vegetables and even meats in sealed tin-plated steel cans. Commercial “potted meat” was slow cooked in pottery and then covered with a layer of fat for preservation and flavor enhancement. Trabings’ 1888 catalog offered over 20 different kinds of “potted” white and red meat, along with canned seafood.
Fresh meat, fish and dairy products needed to be on ice. The Laramie River usually froze in some places to three-foot depths every winter; sheds were built to store ice year-round. D.P. Macarter had anticipated the need for ice well before the tracks reached Laramie. He advertised ice in the June 19, 1868 issue of the Frontier Index, claiming that he could supply 700 tons of “Artic Crystal Ice” from the Laramie River. The newspaper editor opined that he sold the “coldest ice south of Alaska.”
Local ranches and hunters supplied meat from livestock and wild game, but there also were other local pre-1900 producers. One Laramie company started by John Huempner made bottled horseradish in 1892 from his factory at the south end of 2nd St. though the radishes came from Omaha. Another was the Laramie Bottling Works established by N.C. Peterson, advertising in 1897 “all kinds of temperance drinks including birch beer, ginger ale and mineral waters” from his factory at the south end of Front Street on the West Side. The Laramie Brewing company had long been making beer from the brewery “on the river two miles north of town.”
After 1900 many changes came for Laramie’s groceries; that’s another story.
By Judy Knight
Caption: Peabody’s grocery store, at 202 S. 2nd St., Laramie, now the location of the Crowbar & Grill. The street is unpaved and the sidewalk is wooden; the people are unidentified. The buggy out front might belong to a customer as it is too small for a typical delivery wagon. The photo, half of a stereopticon slide, was taken around 1878 by A.S. Peabody’s younger brother Edwin from Salem, Massachusetts, a professional photographer. C.S. Dunbar, the previous owner, was still named in a sign under the building’s cornice. The partial view of the building to the left is Edward Ivinson’s Wyoming National Bank of Laramie, which he sold in 1888.
Photo credit: Laramie Plains Museum.