Built in 1910 as a modern edifice, it was torn down in the 1960’s. Learn about Converse Building.

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.

Thurman Wesley Arnold (1891-1969) was educated in Laramie schools, but his father saw to it that his son had a first-rate higher education, sending him to Princeton College in New Jersey, and then to Harvard Law School. He received his law degree in 1914.

Like most of the women who wound up in the new town of Laramie, Martha Salisbury Boswell didn’t do anything spectacular, she stayed in the background. But what she endured may be typical of many a young wife on the frontier.

Not all cowboys were as depicted in Western movies.

The earliest cowgirls of renown were female athletes too, the trick riders and shooters of the Wild West shows.

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.”

On May 27, 1912, readers of the Laramie Daily Boomerang were shocked to learn that Wyoming’s powerful Senator F.E. Warren had gone down with the great ship Titanic. They already knew of the sinking. It had happened more than a month earlier, and the news traveled the world in less than a day. Why did it take so long for word of Warren’s spectacular demise to reach Wyoming?

Take a look at sidewalks of Laramie—if they are not cracked and crumbling, you may notice an oval mark in one corner with the name “Nelson” proudly pressed into the wet concrete.

“Colonel” Billy Root was a Laramie businessman who dealt in farm equipment, exported wild animals to varous collectors and opened an “opera house.”

One of America’s celebrated humorists of the 19th century gathered enough material from his seven-year stay in Laramie that his “paragraphing” (as he called it) provided enough fodder for a lifetime. Edgar Wilson Nye (1850-1896), who wrote under the pen name “Bill Nye,” might have remained obscure but for Laramie and a mule named “Boomerang.”

Sometimes a married couple becomes well known because one of them is an important person in the life of a town. But in the case of Peter and Mary Louise Hanson, both made significant contributions. Not the least of which is the preservation of their home in the University Neighborhood Historic District of Laramie

In the mid-1980s, two women who had a close association with the University of Wyoming (UW) were persuaded to record their memories of the 1920s in Laramie.

Louisa Swain—history maker in 1870

She came. She left her mark. She left.

Local woman, Gladys Corthell marches in Boston suffrage parade 1914

New Hampshire native Nathaniel Kimball Boswell (1836-1921) was in the right place at the right time to make a name for himself in the raw frontier of Wyoming Territory in 1867.

The first book on Wyoming birds was written by a geologist, Wilbur Clinton Knight.

Edward Neville Rogers (1864-1950) came to Laramie in 1904 so he could breathe.

August 29, 1904, witnessed an act of racial hatred in Laramie, Wyoming. A crowd of men broke into the county jail, seized and African American man and lynched him from a nearby streetlight pole.