Walking tour of Atlantic City Wyoming

[Music] on our second day in Wyoming we are visiting Atlantic City forget together of the Atlantic City Historical Society and a walking tour of the historical town now our walking tour today is a guided tour of clinic city and we'll be taking a look at some historical landmarks and points of interest many of the spots buildings and the things that were there historically are long gone so it's just a point of interest and we're going to be guided by a member of the Atlantic City Historical Society now since I was not a member of Historical Society prior to this morning and because I have never met the gentleman doing the tour I'm not going to ask him to our lab mics I'm gonna use a camera mounted mic that I'm using right now and hopefully we'll get some of the descriptions of some of these sites the one way or the other I hope you can get some sort of an indication of how much history there just is in this spot in Wyoming that really isn't all that well known so we came up with the idea to redo the walking tour and just as we had done with the book we applied for a grant from the Wyoming cultural trust fund because of their experience with us with the book they loved us so they readily agreed to give us a grant for the walking tour for this year so lots of folks were involved in updating the map pam drew all the drawings that you'll see on the walking tour today that are each at each signpost we added three new signposts we had the same guy who designed and laid out the book for us do that design and layout for a walking tour map so we were able to enjoy his work again this year and the rest of it you'll see as we go along the tour [Music] so the first sign here is biergarten Gulch so Biergarten Gulch is these belts that comes down here the water source starts up the road aways this water source runs year-round up here I've seen it when it was 40 below zero and the water is still running don't know how to explain that because everything else up here freezes but for some reason this one keeps running so there were supposed to have been two breweries here first two breweries in the Wyoming territory back in the day in 1868 or so no remnants of either one of those buildings still exists and this is the first stop on our tour he took me up there and showed me what French town was as you see it today and there are six dugouts in the ground back then as pam has depicted on her drawing here there were two logs on the edges of the dugout with a wooden framework above the logs and a canvas covering over the dugout there was enough room in the dugout for a bed and a woodstove brochure says obviously it was a seasonal profession there are six foundation here was built by Italian stonemasons that were brought in here just to construct that rock wall for the foundation for the mill but base the foot of the mill was down where the storage unit is now so there was a similar foundation down there and company remaining company had gone bankrupt the carissa was running over in south pass city and zou green and a crew of four or five guys dismantled the Dexter mill as you see it depicted on Pam's drawing and moved it over to South Pass City and it is now the charissa mill so if you've been on the tour through the Caressa you've actually been in the Dexter [Music] oh now they John do you have stragglers like this on your plant tours okay if you compare the old brochure to the new one this is the one place that changed the most before number three used to say this was a schoolhouse I searched and searched and searched for documentation and pictures and everything about a schoolhouse I couldn't find anything definitive we've seen John mines in ski and several other of the locals and I sat in the murk one night when David back in February David had all the pictures down off the wall in the murk and he was cleaning and dusting everything to get ready for the sea this season so the four or five of us a couple of nights in a row pored over those pictures for about five or six hours trying to identify everything on the old map and corroborate images with text this was the one place we had the greatest difficulty the one thing we knew was here was the image that Pam has drawn on the sign there that's the sipes house it was a two-story building quite it stood out like a sore thumb and all the black-and-white pictures we looked at very easy to identify easy to document so that replaced the schoolhouse we put the sipes house here sipes ended up committing suicide I don't know if that prompted the citizens of Atlantic City to tear the house down but they tore the house down and moved it away Pam was just telling me a minute ago she has since we published this found a document that says they moved the building to Lander somebody purchased it Joel hasn't been substantiated but that but this that's really easy to identify in a lot of the old late 18-hundreds pictures that the sipes house was actually here and it was a really attractive house as Pam's depiction shows it was a big place for a landing city but is it really fancy yeah big two-story house and it was a dairy barn that's about all we know about it and some of you have been added on since we stopped the Paragard engulfed so I'll ask again if anybody's got more information than what we know please share that with us one of the harsh sisters and even though the harsh sisters that were to here in town were prominent and dominant on their own after they married nobody ever called them by their married name they were still always the harsh sisters I don't know any additional information about the harsh cabin or the Gustafson cabin that was one of the harsh sisters married name but it's still here and that says a lot for an old building in this town it was called a quaking aspen hut crossing cabin he gave me some paperwork on it back in 1970 describing it as a trapper's cabin in 1834 i he told me that and gave me this paperwork great this guy named great tricks he was a Civil War veteran lived in there when they built Atlantic City but it was already here when the built Atlantic City so maybe the oldest cabin in Wileman expanding and elsewhere was sitting there by the fireplace before I had a stove in there as it was his fireplace to heat and Game and Fish Department had hired me to do a big one sheep study so they handed me this book called Journal of a trapper by Osbourne Russell which was his journal in modern paperback form and his life as a trapper he talks about coming to this cabin in 1834 and visiting the trapper who lived in there and they said it it was uncomfortable on the inside I think it smelled bad or something like that so he didn't stay inside he slept outside but it was as he described it right on the Shoshone trail that went across the mountains to the rendevouz on the Pinedale side so at one time I'm inferring from that and what Jack Davidson told me that there was a Shoshone trail that went right through where Atlantic City is and then up through tops crops meadow on the other side of the highway where they gather pine nuts every year about five miles here so if you want to look at that it's in buckle the Journal of a trapper by outflowing Russell and about halfway through Bucky talks about this cabin 1830 so number eight you clearly see on the back end of this it's been built on to a couple of times but this building is reportedly the original a sayers cabin for here in Atlantic City one of several as I understand where they would assay to gold they come out of the mines from the local area it currently belongs to Laurel and Dale who owned the drop snake and it is part of a one-room B&B that they run here and people just love staying in this whole place that's so neat on the inside the assayer part of it is the only part we really know for sure you don't know any other history about it Pam's research led us to believe that this was actually the Atlantic hotel it was right here about where the TV is clearly miners grubstake restaurant was not here back to mblaq Gutierrez moved that building here from Jeffery City in 1986 at one point it was called the Red Cloud saloon in honor of the old saloon that had been here back in the eighteen hundreds we don't have a great deal of detail or information about these three buildings along here dams poured over pictures to try to get the images correct for the images she drew here for the three buildings and we believe we've got it correct a hundred years from now somebody might come along and say and we found something different we're going to change the brochure [Music] but in 1893 this building started as the Geisler general store and for a number of years much later than that through the 1950s it was closed boarded up there are lots of pictures that show it before the porch was added on obviously before the mercantile Steinman him and before all is garden right here in front one end in the 1960s a couple went to the county commissioners and got a beer license and started serving beer here for the first time in many many many years and it's become now the steakhouse bar saloon that we all know and love the drilling rock was brought into town for competitions among the growlers the miners back in the day where they would use sort of a chisel drill and a hammer turn and hammer turn and hammer to drill the holes to place the dynamite for the explosions in the mine shafts the folks who have inhabited this place today for sure when the guy bought the property last summer he said I'm can't wait to put that drilling rock in my living room and I said don't you dare do that you're gonna screw up my tour so he was kind enough to appreciate our history up here he moved the drilling Rock to its current location so it will always be visible to us he's actually looking for one of the old drill bits and a hammer it's authentic that he can attach here permanently somehow so that nobody can abscond with them so the second month the marker here is the harsh chicken house that's the log cabin on the other side over here to me it's really suspect that that was ever a chicken house because it looks more like a home than a chicken house but maybe of candy store back in the eighteen hundreds early 1900 it was a candy shop and other uh sundries back then owned by the Hough family I'll talk about them more when we get down to this one of the other workers but here behind us is number sixteen some of you have a vantage point of the church up there you can probably certainly see the church was envisioned back in the early 1900s miss Ellen Carpenter of local fame had a great deal to do with that church being put in place they started in 1912 constructing the church it was consecrated in 1913 as st. Andrew's Episcopal Church they celebrated their 100th anniversary obviously a couple of years ago they got a grant put in a brand new bell tower that looks identical to the old one you can't even tell the difference they did a wonderful job they did that in I think was nineteen or twenty fourteen oh they put the new bell tower now the church here in Atlantic City has special meaning for myself and for my wife Janet because we were married in this church on the day of our wedding the organist was a local wildlife biologist who played whiskey before breakfast for the bridal March wasn't necessarily your ordinary ceremony [Music] from about where Bob's cabin is here to the junction with Dexter there were many many different buildings and businesses in here bars saloons hotels shops and it was really difficult to document everything that was here so we pretty much stuck with the old list that was in the old brochure added a couple of things in there that we knew were here at one point and one of these two buildings I don't know which one was the original saloon and which one has been added on since then but one was here as a saloon the other half of the building this is another new night sign post on our tour we're gonna speed ahead to number 23 from number 17 because when I initially did the research and tried to write what's in the brochure for this week I thought the hotel faced that direction towards Dexter Avenue Pam did more research looked at pictures and images and figured out that no that was not true the old memory that the chief hotel faced Dexter Avenue was wrong the chief hotel actually faced Main Street so this number is out of sequence with the rest but hey it's Atlantic City so anyway the chief hotel was here it was built by a guy named Huff he built it for his wife so she could have something to do as if a lady back in the 1800s Early 1900s needed something to do other than caring for the kids he built a hotel for her for her to have the hobby or something in our book there's a story about Butch Cassidy having stayed in this hotel and paid for his bill the morning after his night here with a $20 gold piece so the Huff's had to send all the kids all over town to get changed because they didn't have enough change for a $20 gold and I don't know what the room cost it would have been nice to know that probably 50 cents or so interesting part about the Hough hotel which I'll finish the story about that as we go further down the road in 1904 the Huff's decided they'd had enough of Atlantic City we're going to move to Lander a family down the road was named carpenter the Huff's gave the carpenter family the Huff Hotel or the chief hotel and I'll leave it at that for right now poly cabin and Fisher cabin are those two signposts right there as Pam pointed out from the other side you can see the Fisher cabin better from down there than you can from up by the signpost because it's only the eastern half of that building right there the western halves obviously been added on to since then 20 is the McCauley store the stone building also known as Hyde's Hall to most of us a recent time our president Pam and Steve own that place and have spent great energy and probably a couple of bucks to shore up those walls from the inside to make sure that that may never fall down you probably know an original lead that was a two-story building there was an earthquake that collapsed the top floor which was also stone it's reported that the second floor was a dance hall and the calamity gene worked in the dance hall you know was that you don't have any corroboration for that makes a great story we do know that at Hamilton City which is about five miles northeast of here Calamity Jane was on the 1870 census so she was in the area that's documented we know she was around here is that a stretch to say she worked in the dance hall here at the McCauley store that's the rumor I always it makes a good story you know and you know how rumors are they're good to start with and then they get embellished who knows the second signpost their number 21 is the cemetery which is on private property you can see if you come down here gravesite [Music] now we have one signpost over here one of the blacksmith's signposts is over here and then the new addition to the tour is the tailing pile when the dredge came through towns from about 1933 to 1942 it left these huge piles of dirt that were dredged up from Rockland several places along here we think it ran at least three times through town so there's a pile here there's a pile figure down and there's another shorter one it's claimed I'm not a miner so I have no idea there's still a lot of gold in these tailings piles but they're private property the carpenters got here in 1890 in a covered wagon they were trying to get the Morgan over Rock them to Atlantic City and as I'd like to say that's where the wagon the carpenters stayed when they move into this property there was a dugout pole room where the two-story building that you can kinda see through those big trees set that was a dugout home the carpenters lived in that dugout for a number of years from 1890 until 1904 when the hops gave the carpenters the chief hotel which had been constructed of logs that came from camp Stambaugh out west or east to town Stan bought closed in night 1878 and the army auctioned off all the buildings on the campus the Huff's built the chief hotel out of those logs from capstan Bob in 1904 there was another meanie boom here in town boo boo so the carpenters thought you're going to build a hotel here on our property so this one-story building just the right size sheet on the sides of the logs to square them up on the inside and the outside it just makes perfect sense to me that this was the old cheap hotel that the Carpenters took apartment over here so in 1935 two years decided to expand they took out the old dugout home they had been living and built the two-story building that's round logs they were moved up here that's pretty well-documented they took down what had been and decided patties and built these log cabins that you see here there are four of them right here around on the other side behind a hotel is another cabin that the carpenters called the ice house they would go out in the summertime in the spring and cut ice blocks out of the sloughs and feel like cabin the back side of the cabin with ice big blocks ice and they call that the meat house so they stored their meat and any other Paris was in there through the sunroof oh that cabin was rebuilt in 1942 it's the newest cabin on the property above bills garage somewhere up there on the side of the hill is where that 10 stamp mill was now if you have ever heard even a miniature of one of those run over at South Pass City it's incomprehensible the noise that think the Pistons the stamps are about this big around solid steel driven by a cam and they're pounding rock the crushing rock so 10 of those are working in conjunction along they're pounding rocks up on the side of that hill I can't comprehend the noise number 30 talks about the toll run which was this one out of town over to South Pass City they decided there was so much traffic on it this 1868 or so that they wanted to charge a feed to get people to go from here to South Pass City it didn't last long and died on the line because you can just go around and go another route to South City from there you don't have to use the toll road so it didn't last long that's yeah [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well that's a look at about a three hour walk around Atlantic City I know we didn't get all of the talk about each site that we stopped at I just wasn't able to do that but hopefully I got enough that you found the whole thing interesting now we're gonna head into the Atlantic City mercantil have a beer relax a little bit maybe John will play the piano by the way he's the one that was the organist at our wedding but in any case we'll see you for the next one enjoy your day [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: John Switzer

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Id: To3utD2tKsY

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019