Laramie’s Living History — People
A series of stories prepared for the Albany County Museum Coalition, an alliance of institutions that promote Laramie’s historic and cultural resources. This series originally appeared in the Laramie Boomerang.
The people who comprise the Albany County community come from several social strata, ethnicities, and races.
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Carrie Burton Overton - First African American Girl To Attend the University of Wyoming.
Of the 8,207 residents enumerated in the 1900 census for Laramie, Wyoming, ninety were African American. Of these, seven were girls of school age, but only two were enrolled. Although not written about in any historical overview of Laramie, one, Carrie Burton, would overcome adversity and go on to be the first African American woman to attend the University of Wyoming, a well-known New Yorker and the woman profiled in the 1972 Boomerang article.
Following Frank Tweedy's Valuable Plants. How they traveled from the wilds of Wyoming to New York City and back.
Frank Tweedy was born, raised, and educated in New York, graduating from Union College in 1875 with a degree in civil engineering. He began his surveying career the next year in the Adirondacks, followed by a stint as a sanitation engineer in Rhode Island. All the while, he collected plants.