Wyoming '99: Thursday

Thursday I got up in the morning and headed into town to take pictures of old Holliday sites.

On this block sat the old Holliday department store, established in the 1870s. It burned down in 1948 in a fire folks still remember seeing from all across the plains, and the family decided to dissolve the company.

The store took up the block between Second and Third, Garfield and Custer, with the front facing Second. (It was not all built at once--first it was one building, then two side by side, plus there was a lumber yard--eventually the Holliday Co. took up the whole block.) I remember seeing a plaque marking the spot when I visited Laramie in high school, but there is none there today.

A small part of what's left: Bill Holliday, one of the grandsons, decided to go on with the furniture business, a few blocks away from the old site.

You can't see it in this picture, but there are a couple of apartments attached to this building. This was where my grandfather stayed when he moved to Laramie from New Jersey. It's also where my great-grandmother stayed, with a niece she had adopted as her daughter, when she moved down from Elk Mountain to teach in Laramie schools. (Both Grandfather and my great-grandmother, of course, later married into the Holliday family.)

We follow W.H. Holliday, my grandmother's father, since he's a direct ancestor, but his brother J.T. did pretty well for himself too. My sharp-eyed brother Franklin spotted this door on a building a block over from the site of the old Holliday store. Evidently this was where J.T. set up shop when the Hollidays moved into Laramie. It too is only about a block from the train tracks.

The J.T. Holliday building today houses Terrapin, a store specializing in hemp and hemp products, and a tattoo studio--two traditional Western industries.

Thursday: Holliday Sites . . . Prison . . . Stagecoach Ride . . . Posers

Monday . . . Tuesday . . . Wednesday . . . Thursday . . . Friday . . . Saturday . . . Miscellaneous

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