Museum

City of Torrington

"An equal opportunity employer"

436 East 22nd Avenue Torrington, WY 82240

HOMESTEADERS MUSEUM had its beginning as a bi-centennial project in 1975. It is located in the old Union Pacific Depot in South Torrington on Highway 85. The museum and it’s complex housed the ranching and homesteading history which took place in old Laramie county and Goshen County from 1882 to 1929 and then through WW II.

Following the closing of Ft. Laramie as a protectorate fort and problems with the plains Indians ceased to be a daily event...ranching on the big scale...an investor based business got underway out on the prairies and plains of eastern Wyoming. Some of the largest ranches in this part of the country was Union Cattle Co., Bay State and Swan Livestock and Cattle Co. There was also the Hunter and Coad Bros. ranches on Horse Creek. These were large operations at the time and extended into Nebraska and toward the Colorado - Wyoming state lines.

Ranching did not bring the wanted population growth to the area the Government through important, so homesteading and homesteading acts were passed...advertising done in large eastern newspapers and the west was opened up to massive migration...all wanting a part of the ¼ section of "free" land promised them by the government...if only they would come and invest five years proving up on the land and claiming it as their own. So...they came, by the thousands from every part of the United States to stake their claims, turn the sod, tame the land and build a new life on the great American Prairie Lands...called Wyoming and Goshen County.

Homesteaders Museum houses not only memorabilia of the period, a ‘shack’ built in 1910 by Ben Trout, a Union Pacific Gallery, but the written records and historical accounts...land claims, photographs and other materials, of this wild and wonderful period in Wyoming’s colorful history.