The wide-ranging Otto Gramm of Laramie He turns up everywhere you look
Otto Gramm (1846-1927) pops up in so many aspects of Laramie’s history, it seems that there must have been ten men by that name. Did one 81-year-old really do all that in a lifetime? But most of what has been written is true—verified by newspapers and other primary sources.
Business & Industry pursuits
In our history series, we have written about the drug stores of Laramie—it was in 1870 that this Ohio native got his start in Laramie as a druggist. We’ve written about early banking in Laramie—in 1876 he turns up as a director of a bank that Edward Ivinson founded in 1871, eventually serving as Vice President through 1895 when the bank was reorganized.
Also, Otto Gramm is listed in 1902 as Vice President of the Laramie, Hahn’s Peak & Pacific Railroad that eventually reached Centennial in 1907. He got involved in logging—in 1914 he organized the Fox Park Timber Company and founded the short-lived town of Gramm that had a post office until 1926. In 1907 he advertised as manager of the Boston and Wyoming Lumber Company in Laramie. In 1920 he founded the Otto Lumber Company in Laramie with his second wife’s son-in-law H. Neale Roach.
In 1898, Gramm was the successful bidder to become the lessee of the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) rolling mills, running one of the largest employers in Laramie for five years until it was sold to a Colorado firm. A disastrous fire in 1910 put 300 men out of work. The factory was not rebuilt. As might be expected, Gramm was a prominent member of the local Board of Trade, which searched for new industries to replace the one that was lost.
In the early 1900s Gramm began investing in mining coal and other minerals. Unlike others who were convinced there was a fortune in gold and silver in nearby mountains, he mostly concentrated on coal and oil deposits—and made money.
Government pursuits
White he was still a druggist, Otto Gramm became chief of the city-operated Laramie Fire Department, succeeding former chief Jethro Holliday in 1884. His last hurrah was to be elected Laramie City mayor in 1926, just a few months before he died in 1927.
But there’s more. In 1884, he was appointed Wyoming Territorial Fish Commissioner. His responsibility was to build a fish hatchery that the Territorial Legislature had mandated, with a $500 allotment. As Kim Viner has written in “Good Fishing Needs a Good Hatchery” on the website wyoachs.com, getting the job done required some of Gramm’s own money, though he was eventually reimbursed. This first hatchery in Wyoming was located on Soldier Spring south of Laramie.
In 1888 he was on the ticket as a Republican to be the Albany County Treasurer, and was elected. That same year he sold the drug store to William C. Wilson, who continued to operate it at 123 Ivinson Ave. (Jeffrey’s Bistro today). From this point through 1904, his income came from government salaries and his considerable investments.
Gramm’s term as Albany County Treasurer led to his receiving the Republican nomination to be the first treasurer of the State of Wyoming, founded on July 10, 1890. He was chosen in a special October election for the four-year term.
Prison lessee and UW trustee
Though apparently not a college graduate himself, in 1895 Gramm was appointed to the unsalaried UW Board of Trustees. He was one of three allowed from Albany County. Grace Raymond Hebard was another who served as board secretary with him most of the 14 years that he was a trustee. The third local member rotated among a number of different people. On several occasions he was the Board President.
In 1903 he did receive income from an 8-year appointment as lessee of the State Penitentiary in Rawlins, responsible for running it at 50 cents per day for each inmate. He succeeded his old friend N.K. Boswell in that position. When Gramm took over, there were 180 prisoners. By the end of his term there were 271. It was the lessee’s responsibility to stay within the budget, he could add to the income by selling things the prisoners made. The lessee could keep whatever was left over after expenses were deducted.
Civic activities
Gramm belonged to five men’s fraternal organizations in Laramie, plus the Rotary Club. Within a few months of his arrival in Laramie in 1870, he was among the young men who organized the first Laramie Municipal Band. Much later, he was recruited to organize the first Albany County fair. When the first radio station in Wyoming , KFBU, broadcast from one of the back towers at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in 1922, he was involved with that, too.
Personal life
It would seem that Gramm would have hardly had time for a personal life, and that appears to be almost borne out with what can be found in the newspapers.
He arrived in Laramie at the age of 24, after serving a nearly 14-year career as a helper and then apprentice in the Clinton House Drug Store of his foster father Albert Tritscheller in Chillicothe, Ohio. Gramm was born in 1846 in that town, he was 8 when orphaned with his 3 younger siblings when their parents died. He was taken in as a foster child by relatives, the Tritscheller family. He stayed very close to them throughout his life, especially to his foster mother, Margaret Tritscheller, with many trips to Chillicothe over the years.
The one person he knew in Wyoming Territory was Dr. John Finfrock, a military physician, also from Ohio, who had been assigned in 1863 to Ft. Halleck, 40 miles west of what would become Laramie City. In 1870, Dr. Finfrock had resigned from the military and set up private practice in Laramie. Gramm arrived by March 1 that year to board with the Finfrock family. He obtained a building and started advertising his drug store in October of 1870.
First marriage
On December 6, 1870, Otto Gramm wed Catherine Slaret (1845-1925) in a ceremony conducted at the Finfrock residence by Episcopalian Rev. John Cornell. Very little is known about Catherine, except that she was also a native of Chillicothe. She lived in Laramie through the 1880s, and was buried at Greenhill Cemetery in 1925 at age 80.
The Gramms had one child, a daughter named Edith (1875-1905). Edith might have been destined to become nationally known as a star of operettas. Educated in the Laramie schools, in 1893 she started attending a women’s finishing school in Philadelphia. She studied voice in Philadelphia, but in 1896 came down with typhoid fever, then rampant in the U.S. Her recovery took a long time, much of it spent in Laramie with her father.
The Gramm “family tree” on Ancestry.com shows that after Edith’s recovery, Otto was granted a divorce from Catherine in 1899. She did not contest it. I have not found any corroborating divorce information, but there is evidence that Catherine moved to Omaha before 1899.
In 1900, Edith resumed her musical studies with composer and vocal coach William Neidlinger in Chicago, and in 1901, she got the lead role in the touring company of a musical, “The Runaway Girl.” Her notices were glowing: “With power as an actress with even greater power as a singer, fortune seems to have chosen her as a future queen of the light opera stage…” said the Journal and Tribune of Knoxville, Tennessee in 1901 after her performance there.
She continued to commute back and forth from New York to Laramie for vacation jaunts with her father. But in September of 1905, she was stricken with pneumonia and died in New York. Her body was returned to Laramie where people were dumbfounded by her sudden demise. Flags were at half-mast on the day of her funeral.
A black cloud
The divorce from Catherine most likely didn’t pain Otto much, other than a financial settlement, as they had been separated a long time. It had to have been awkward for Laramie friends since each attended social events in Laramie, but not the same ones, requiring delicacy on the part of hostesses. I found no mention where they attended anything together, even when Edith was young.
The death of a child, especially a vivacious and devoted only daughter as Edith was, had to be a severe blow to both parents. But rather than withdrawing, as Catherine appears to have done, Otto plunged into even more activity. He busied himself as an active participant in fraternal organizations, the UW trustees and businesses.
The worst black cloud that hung over Otto Gramm was the result of one of his actions as Wyoming State Treasurer. He had deposited about $55,000 in state funds in a private bank, the T.A. Kent Bank of Cheyenne. Over 3/4ths of that money was lost. The bank had been founded by Thomas Kent, Sr. who came to Cheyenne in 1867, made a fortune in the liquor business there, and in the early 1880s established a bank. F.B. Sheldon was the cashier at Kent Bank, and in 1888, Sheldon was hired away as chief deputy to the elected Territorial Treasurer.
Otto Gramm inherited Sheldon as deputy when he took office as the first State Treasurer in 1890. In those days people had to sign bond papers, guaranteeing that Gramm was honest and would not misuse state money. He had no reason to believe that the Kent Bank was unstable, especially with a trusted deputy who had worked there for over five years.
Bank failure
But in summer 1893, the Kent Bank failed. It was the victim of a “run” on U.S. banks that was occurring. Banks used depositors’ savings to make loans and other investments, but could not quickly convert all their holdings into cash if all depositors demanded withdrawal at once. Banks closed their doors; often an “assignee” was appointed to sort out the finances and dole out whatever assets they could to depositors. In the Kent Bank case, the assignee was able to return only about $10,000 to the state, leaving a loss of $44,147.31.
The legislature was outraged, and demanded that the Attorney General sue Gramm and those who had bonded him, including the popular politician, F.E. Warren. The case went through District Court and was appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court. In 1896, the Court ruled that Gramm and his bondsmen could not be held accountable since state law did not specify that state funds should be “safely” kept—and no one could have known in advance that the bank would fail.
In 1893, nearly every state had a half-dozen or more banks that failed. Newspapers had to be careful, lest their reporting create panic among the depositors and cause an unwarranted “run.” The Cheyenne newspapers reported nothing about the Kent Bank failure until months after it had closed and the assignee was liquidating its assets as best he could. It was easy to pin the blame on Gramm as responsible for a huge state loss.
Even though he was legally exonerated, Democrats eagerly portrayed Republicans in Wyoming as crooks, “like Otto Gramm,” in subsequent elections. He never ran for State office again, though he stayed very active in the Republican Party.
Second marriage
In 1909, Gramm married widow Hannah Durlacher and moved to her home, which still stands at 501 S. 5th St. He was 63, still active in civic and business pursuits, she was around 54. We don’t know much about his personality, except that he got along well with men and appeared to be good at selecting employee managers who would see to it that his enterprises succeeded, like running the State Penitentiary in Rawlins as an absentee lessee.
He married into an extended family—Hannah had three married daughters and grandchildren. In fact, their wedding was held in the home of one of the Durlacher daughters, Mrs. C.H. Colt in Lincoln, Nebraska. The second marriage appears to have been a happy one.
Green memory?
Gramm was an unapologetic Republican—detractors often accused him of partisanship rather than statesmanship, but UW historian Deborah Hardy gives him credit for helping to steer UW through the “crisis of 1907” when 30% of the faculty and the university president quit in a tumultuous year—and for quietly resigning in 1911 when the new Democratic governor sought to give a less partisan appearance to the board.
Gramm’s philanthropy was giving his time to institutions, rather than founding ones that would carry the Gramm name forward. When he died in 1927, his obituary was published in many Wyoming papers. Over a year before his death, an editor in his hometown of Chillicothe gave him a fitting tribute by publishing: “Whether in business, either private or public, or in social or spiritual life of Laramie, Otto Gramm has maintained such high moral standards and obligations as will keep his memory green in this community long after he has departed this life.”
By Judy Knight
Source: Kirkland Studio, Cheyenne; Laramie Plains Museum Collection
Caption: Otto Gramm (1846-1927); Undated