Wyoming

When Weston County was formed in 1890, Newcastle was the only incorporated town within its borders, and thus became the county seat. Newcastle occupied a strategic location on the main line of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, where a spur line ran to the Kilpatrick Brothers and Collins coal mine, the source of fuel for the railroad’s locomotives. The first county offices were located in the basement of Kilpatrick Brothers and Collins Mercantile in downtown Newcastle.

The Worland Ranch, located on the west side of the Bighorn River, comprises the original townsite of Worland as well as a 904-acre working ranch with a dense arrangement of buildings developed by the town’s original homesteader, Charles Henry “Dad” Worland. The ranch is located within the town limits, west of downtown.

The tracks for the Union Pacific Railroad—the nation’s first transcontinental line—reached Evanston in November 1868. In 1870, the company established a steam locomotive service facility there, and in 1871 a twenty-stall stone roundhouse was completed. The roundhouse served as the nucleus around which the Union Pacific’s railyard complex evolved between 1871 and the present.

Originally established as the Wyoming Insane Asylum by the Wyoming Territorial Legislature in 1886, the Wyoming State Hospital in Evanston is dedicated to the care of the state’s mentally ill. Situated on a hill about a mile south of downtown, this historic complex is visible from most of Evanston's downtown neighborhoods as well as from Interstate 80; generations of the community’s residents have worked at the hospital. The oldest part of the campus is a cluster of handsome brick buildings curved around a lawn studded with huge cottonwoods.

Uinta County is one of the first five counties in Wyoming established by the First Wyoming Territorial Legislature on December 1, 1869. In 1873, Governor John A. Campbell, Wyoming's first Territorial Governor, approved an act of the legislature authorizing the commissioners of Uinta County to erect a jail and courthouse. The original Uinta County Courthouse in downtown Evanston has served the county for a century and a half, with two major expansions to meet the changing demands of the county’s population.

Evanston was established as a railroad town when the Union Pacific Railroad was constructed through southwestern Wyoming in 1868. When the railroad was completed the following year, the company hired Chinese immigrant laborers to work on railroad section crews and in the nearby Union Pacific coal mines. Evanston was home to a substantial Chinese population from the early 1870s through the 1890s. The census of 1880 listed more than 100 Chinese residents in a town of 1,200.

Along a remote county road in the southwest corner of Wyoming, three beehive-shaped stone structures rise up out of the prairie—the Piedmont Charcoal Kilns. Built to transform wood into charcoal to be used in iron-ore smelters, the kilns are the only visible reminder of an industry that flourished here starting in 1869 and lasting through the 1870s. More than forty stone kilns once dotted this area, producing per month an estimated 100,000 bushels of charcoal, all of which was shipped by rail to iron-ore smelters in Utah.

Rising up just east of downtown to an elevation of 7,800 feet, the Snow King Ski Area is a historic and cultural landmark in Jackson Hole. The oldest ski area in Wyoming, Snow King made the formerly quiet ranching and farming town into a major national and international winter sports destination.

The Center for the Arts in Jackson was created through a collaboration of local arts organizations who recognized the need for a single facility for arts activities in the Jackson Hole area and began planning for such a structure in 1991. Today, the Center for the Arts is a sprawling complex of arts facilities occupying a full block, two blocks south of the Jackson town square on the edge of the commercial center. The property consists of two main “pavilions” built in phases.

The property now known as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve was originally homesteaded in 1903 by David Spalding, who filed on 160 acres at the mouth of Phelps Lake north of Jackson Hole. Three years later the property was purchased by Louis Joy, who, with the help of Maxwell Struthers Burt, developed it as the JY Dude Ranch. Opening in 1908, the JY was the first dude ranch in Jackson Hole. Joy continued to operate the JY until 1930, when he sold it to the Snake River Land Company (SRLC), a corporation created by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.