Encampment, WY

Tough Little Town with a Frontier Boardwalk

Grand Encampment started as a boomtown in 1897, just a year after miners discovered copper ore in the Sierra Madre range to the west, soon swelling to more than 3,000 residents with electricity, running water, and even a fountain that spurted 75 feet into the air.

When the copper mining industry failed in 1908, the town settled into a more sedate pace and people quietly dropped the “Grand.”

Encampment (pop. 462), a southern Wyoming town situated 7,343 above sea level, has weathered the ups and downs of ranching and timbering that are its economic mainstays, but strolling down to the all-volunteer Grand Encampment Museum can satisfy any longing for the bustle of the town’s mining boom days.

“What is so impressive about the museum is the care and detail that obviously went into its creation,” says Bill Graves, a visitor from California. “All the small towns of the West, at least the ones where I have spent some time, have museums. Most are a collection of attic clean outs and what town history buffs have been able to scrounge or talk longtime residents into giving up and donating.”

With its board sidewalk and frontier buildings, the Grand Encampment Museum that opened in 1966 now preserves some of the area’s oldest buildings: the Lake Creek Stage Station, Wolfard one-room schoolhouse, Peryam homestead house, Palace Bakery and Ice Cream Parlor, Webber Springs Forest Service Guard Station, a blacksmith shop, and tie hack cabins—cabins built by workers cutting ties for the railroads.

From the boardwalk, the view south is across sagebrush-covered hillsides toward the canyon at the north fork of the Encampment River. Museum Board President Doug Tieszen says new buildings moved to the museum are placed to preserve that view.

Leonard Clark is a longtime volunteer and unofficial museum caretaker. “I think it’s the crown jewel of our community,” Clark says.

Through the years, dozens of volunteers have done everything from cleaning and exhibit preparation to answering visitors’ questions while the museum is open from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The museum also includes a new interpretive center and a series of small cabins with interiors depicting a vintage lifestyle. “Its creators were not content just to display artifacts,’’ Graves says. “They have put them in context with their use and their time, which allows a visitor to step into local history and be surrounded by it.”

And one of the places you can step into a unique history is on the upper or lower level of the two-story outhouse. It’s a replica of those used by mountain residents who got tired of shoveling snow to reach the lower level in the winter that lasts three times as long as summer.

Sierra Madre Mountains to the west of town were once home to the mining camps. Now they attract folks who like to hike, picnic, camp, fish, and hunt in the summer, or snowmobile and cross-country ski in the winter.

The center of the town’s community life is the school, where students from preschool through grade 12 attend classes in the same new building. Most of the streets in town are still dirt, and there are only 10 businesses. But RVs can park at the town lot—which has both water and electricity—for a donation to the town coffers.

And local folks know to end any trip to town by climbing on a stool at the Sugar Bowl and ordering a homemade ice cream soda, then listening to the old-timers talk about the good old days and the future of the country.

Candy Moulton is a freelance writer who lives near Encampment. She’s the author of nine books, including The Grand Encampment: Settling the High Country.

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