Jeremiah Boies: pioneer jack-of-all-trades and undertaker ”Oldest man in Wyoming” when he died in 1900
Jeremiah Boies (1804-1900) didn’t start out to be an undertaker, but he saw an opportunity and made the most of it. His activities can be traced from newspapers and on the website Ancestry.com, though his name is often spelled “Bois, Boise, or Boys.”
Marries Martha Symons
In 1866, Jeremiah married widow Martha Uren Symons (1830-1917) in Wisconsin. At the time, he was around 61 and she 36. Each had been married previously, probably at least twice before, and each brought children to the marriage.
The day they arrived in Laramie is documented by Jane Ivinson, who was asked in 1899 to write her memories of Laramie’s early history. It was May 10, 1868, she says, when the Ivinsons arrived. When she awoke the next morning, “drenched” from a leaky roof in her husband’s store, she observed that across the muddy street (and north a block or two) another tent had gone up, “belonging to Mr. Boise [sic], whose wife had gone east to buy millinery supplies.” That tent was at the SW corner of what would become 2nd and University—and the lot was where Jeremiah and Martha Boies remained for the rest of their long lives.
Jeremiah’s now missing diary says that Jane is mistaken on the date. Jeremiah is reported to have given it as May 2, ahead of the first train to arrive in Laramie which recent research by Kim Viner verifies as May 3, 1868. That may be the date that the Ivinsons arrived. It is also likely that Jeremiah Boies didn’t have his tent fully erected until May 4, when Jane noticed it for the first time. But dates do conflict—did everyone have a calendar in 1868?
Adventurers
Descendants of Martha’s son, John H. Symons, have documented the Boies family. At around age 12, James S. Symons came west with his stepfather and mother in two Conestoga wagons. His older brother, John H. Symons remained in Wisconsin with his grandmother, though he eventually settled down in Laramie. Otis Halverson of Cheyenne is a great grandson of John H. Symons, and has provided much of this family history research.
The Boieses had a novel approach to going west– they joined the crowd following the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR) as it laid the first transcontinental track through Nebraska Territory. Martha might have had experience with hotel ownership, thanks to one she inherited from her first husband. The couple probably had money from selling everything they had in Wisconsin, so as they went west, they purchased buildings along the UPRR route and outfitted them as boarding houses for railroad workers.
Thus it could be deduced that they were part of what is frequently called “Hell on Wheels,” the mobile collection of saloon-keepers, gamblers, dance hall girls and tent-dwellers who lived off the wages paid to railroad workers. That the respectable Boies family was part of this rag-tag group of often-maligned rowdies gives one pause. Certainly young James Symons must have seen a lot of sights he had not experienced back home in Wisconsin.
In Wyoming, they were in Cheyenne as it became established, then moved on to Dale City, about 35 miles west of Cheyenne. Here the UPRR crews spent the spring of 1868, impeded by snows and material delays in building a huge trestle that was needed before the tracks could reach Laramie. It must have been a relief to finally come out of that muddy Dale Creek bottom land and into the high, dry plains of Laramie, despite the downpour that first night.
Becoming established
The rowdy acquaintances of the Boieses moved on quickly to the next new town west, but Jeremiah and Martha stayed put in Laramie. The tent they erected at first soon gave way to two separate buildings on their chosen lot. One was the large family home that actually faced what is now University St., between 2nd and 1st Streets, and the other was the shop/barn at 100 S. 2nd St., on the corner of University and 2nd. Where their buildings once stood is a new building that was “Music West” and has had several other occupants since, including the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
It is quite likely that in Cheyenne and Dale City Jeremiah and Martha met two other pioneers who would be influential in their new lives in Laramie. One was N.K. Boswell, then a drug store owner in Cheyenne and community activist for law and order. The other was J.H. Hayford, later to become proprietor of a newspaper, the Sentinel. Both were about 30 years younger than Boies, and no doubt viewed him as the “old man” of the group, somewhat of a rarity on the frontier.
Boswell and Hayford decided to settle with their families in Laramie. It took a while for these early settlers to get clear title to the lots they had selected, but eventually they were able to purchase them from the UPRR. No doubt families like the Boieses were convinced that the UPRR intended that Laramie would not be a fly-by-night town like Dale City, but would be the kind of place where an enterprising person could put down roots.
“Earliest mortician”
Jeremiah had woodworking skills, and set up shop building furniture. The shop also became a retail business for painting and wallpaper supplies. As with most furniture-makers, he was also called upon to make caskets. A Thees family account in “Laramie—Gem City of the Plains” (1987) edited by Mary Kay Mason, says that another early Laramie immigrant named John Thees made “coffins for Jeremiah Boies, earliest mortician, whom he had known in Missouri Valley, Iowa.”
Martha had two trades; she ran the family home as a boarding house too, often with six or seven boarders as noted in the decennial censuses of Laramie. She also had her millinery business, probably conducted out of the home, which had the same address as the shop, though they were two separate buildings as shown on the 1885 Laramie City Map.
Undertaking trade
Deaths were a commonplace occurrence on the frontier—though the majority of the newcomers didn’t die of old age in those early days. A favorite line of mine begins the history of Greenhill Cemetery written by Peg Tremper: “In the early days of Laramie, people were buried pretty much where they dropped when the rope was cut.”
It didn’t take much to become an undertaker in those days—all that was needed were the skills to build a coffin and ability to dig a grave. A reputation for promptness helped. With no established cemetery, burials could be most anywhere, though a couple of places became established by custom, one east of the city limits about where the earliest part of the UW campus is today and one over the river and on a ranch west of the city. It’s not surprising that other burial sites have turned up over the years.
It would be nice if Jeremiah had kept records of whom he buried and where in those early days, but that might be lost with that early diary. One of Jeremiah’s labeled caskets was even discovered in 1905, buried in the gypsum soil south of town. The unidentified remains were reburied, probably in Potter’s Field of Greenhill Cemetery, which dates from 1882.
Claims to fame
Jeremiah’s friendship with editor J.H. Hayford of the Sentinel is obvious through the frequent mentions in that paper about the former’s state of health and occasional travels. “Our old friend Jeremiah Boies, who has been spending a couple of months visiting friends and relatives in Ohio and Iowa, will return this evening. We bid him welcome home,” is a typical entry, from the Sentinel of February 1890. Jeremiah obliged with frequent ads in Hayford’s newspaper. The two families were neighbors on 2nd St.
Martha, on the other hand, made history through her acquaintance with N.K. Boswell. He had become the sheriff of Albany County—tasked with setting up a makeshift courtroom and staff for accommodating what would be the first jury in the world to have women on it. It would not do to have the same bailiff who took care of the men to be responsible for the six women jurors also, so Boswell asked Martha Boies if she would become the women’s bailiff.
It is as the first female bailiff in the U.S that we remember Martha now. She is enshrined in the Wyoming House for Historic Women on 2nd St. in Laramie.
Jeremiah achieved other claims to fame. In 1874 he was elected as Albany County Coroner. And when he died in 1900, he was hailed across the state as the oldest Wyoming resident at the time—at age 97.
Life well lived
“Mr. Boies was known by almost everybody who has ever resided in Laramie, for he was actively engaged in business here up to within a few years of his death. The greater portion of his life was spent in mining and in the hotel business, in both of which he was reasonably successful. . . .his third wife, Mrs. Symons, survives him.” So states his obituary in the Boomerang, Nov. 12, 1900. The Cheyenne Leader of Nov. 15, 1900 in addition to hailing him as the oldest resident of Wyoming says that he had three wives and nine children, with one wife and two children surviving him.
Martha was married a fourth time after Jeremiah’s death to a sheep grower named James Atkinson. When he wasn’t at his ranch in Garrett, he made his home with her at 100 S. 2nd St., along with the boarders. Atkinson died in 1913; Martha died in 1917 at the age of 86.
Early lives
Among the scanty bits of information about their early histories, Halverson has learned that Martha’s first spouse, John Symons, was 20 years older than her; his chief occupation in Wisconsin was as a landlord. “In 1861, while collecting rents, he was murdered and found in a millpond,” writes Halverson. “Martha was left with two young sons, John and James. Within a year and a half, we find evidence of another marriage, but it was not to last, for reasons unknown.”
As for Jeremiah, he was born in Ohio in 1804; his father emigrated from Ireland, his mother from Germany. He had been married and “had three children by 1848 when word of gold in California reached him,” according to Halverson. He dropped whatever he was doing, and headed to the goldfields where no more is known about him until 1857.
In 1857, Jeremiah was in SW Wisconsin and married again. Halverson also says there was a son from this union, possibly Curtis. There is no explanation of what happened to his first two wives, let alone where the children were all the time he was in California.
There are indications that two children accompanied Jeremiah and Martha west. Oldest would have been James S. Symons, Martha’s son, but there is another son mentioned in a Cheyenne census published in 1869, Curtis (“Kirk” or “Curt”) Boies. He was 9 in 1869, probably Jeremiah’s youngest son. Curtis turns up in the newspaper as a Laramie elementary school student in 1871. By 1878 he was a UPRR telegraph messenger who had just been promoted to telegraph operator at another UPRR station. In later years the family history locates him in Iowa and in 1895 the Boomerang reports that he was “visiting his parents, Mrs. and Mrs. J. Boies” from Omaha. Jeremiah did have another son, James Albert Boies, whose death in 1898 was reported in the Laramie Republican newspaper because of the connection with Jeremiah, who by that time was gaining distinction as the oldest person living in Wyoming.
Albert was 30 when the Boies family arrived in Laramie, already established somewhere else. He left a wife and five sons, and was so respected that all the businesses of his town of Woodbine, Iowa, closed on the day of his funeral as a mark of respect. Albert’s mother is listed on Ancestry.com as Eliza Moffet, a hint about Jeremiah’s first wife. His obituary also says that Albert was born in 1837 in Pennsylvania. That leaves another whole trail for family historians to follow – what was Jeremiah doing in Pennsylvania then?
By Judy Knight
Source: Judy Knight
Caption: A faded and weathered sandstone tombstone in Greenhill cemetery is that of Laramie’s first undertaker, inscribed “Jeremiah Boies, Died Nov. 11, 1900, Aged 97 Years.” His wife of 35 years, Martha Symons Boies Atkinson, is buried next to him in an unmarked grave. Martha married Garrett Wyoming rancher James Atkinson by 1903, after Jeremiah’s death. She is listed in the cemetery records as “Martha Atkinson.”
Source: Laramie Sentinel, Nov. 6, 1880
Caption: Ad by Jeremiah Boies with the news that “During my visit east, I purchased a complete set of Embalming Instruments, and received a full course of instructions in the art of Embalming on Scientific Principles.” One such training course in Iowa in 1882 consisted of six days of instruction. Boies was still in the undertaking business, even after J.W. Stryker arrived in Laramie in 1878. Stryker worked first as an undertaker and furniture maker with the Trabing Brothers, then with W.H. Holliday. Stryker’s name still persists in the one funeral home still in business in Laramie, Montgomery-Stryker.