The Pritchards of Hyattville, Wyoming and Why They Left West Virginia
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The Pritchards of Hyattville, Wyoming and why they left West Virginia By Linda Huey and David Dronsick The Pritchard family in West Virginia around 1900 before moving to Wyoming. Top row: Jennie, Addie, Alice, Clara Middle row: Lucy, Thomas Tavner and Lucy Ann Elizabeth (the parents), Cort Front row: Irl Preface “Count me in!” was my excited response during a conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 2014. My brother, Paul Huey, and his wife, Lois, retired archaeologists who love to travel, had just announced that they were planning to take a trip to Wyoming. Suddenly my sleeping sentimental memories and desire to return awakened with a jolt. I hadn’t been there since I was a child when we visited my mother’s relatives in 1949, 1957, 1961, and 1963. We would drive in our 1949 Ford from where we lived in New York State when few super highways existed. Now it had been more than 50 years, and time for another trip. I nostalgically remember our wonderful visits to my mother’s Aunt Jennie and Uncle Ralph’s ranch near Hyattville in Big Horn County. Addie Pritchard, my mother’s mother, seemed to have been particularly close to her sister, Jennie Pritchard, who had married Ralph Mercer. Addie had died shortly after I was born, but for my mother, there was still Jennie to visit, as well as other Pritchards in Hyattville. My mother’s grandparents Thomas Tavner and Lucy Ann Elizabeth Pritchard were long gone, but their children (her aunts and uncles) were all still in Wyoming - Jennie, Alice, Lucy, Clara, Irl, and Cort - not to mention the many cousins she grew up with. My mother, Marguerite Kennedy Huey, was born in 1912, and grew up in various towns in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin near Hyattville including Colter, Worland, Powell, Riverton, and Pavillion. In 1907 her Pritchard grandparents had left West Virginia and brought their family of nine to Hyattville where they built and ran a large rooming house. They advertised it as a “tourists’ home” in the newspapers, but we always called it the old “hotel.” Many old photographs of my mother as a child with all her cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents were taken there. I had never thought about how as she spent the rest of her life living on the east coast, my mother must have missed being surrounded by the large extended family she had grown up with in Wyoming. These were people who for the most part I had lost touch with, and I have never experienced being close to an extended family. My grandmother, Addie, was the only one in her generation of the Pritchard family who had left the state of Wyoming, which eventually led to even my cousins and me growing up on opposite coasts of America. Then, in 2015, we enjoyed a wonderful trip back to Wyoming, finding a whole lot hadn’t changed, only that Hyattville now had even fewer people with a population of about 75. I was thrilled to see the old “hotel” was still standing in the middle of town. The ranch outside of town was doing well and still in the Mercer family. Visiting the ranch felt as if time had stood still and I was a stationary observer, as I could see in my mind five generations of Mercers all at once. Visiting the old hotel touched me emotionally, and inspired my husband, David, and me to start researching answers to why the family had left West Virginia and moved to Hyattville. A second trip to Wyoming in 2016 resulted in discovering and meeting more relatives, hearing stories, finding boxes of pictures and letters in their basements and attics, and accumulating precious tidbits of information. A forgotten world soon began to open. 2 3 Table of Contents 1. Why Wyoming and Hyattville? 5 Wyoming…Historical Context 5 Railroads 6 West Virginia 8 Reasons for Moving 9 Why Hyattville? 12 The First Trips to Wyoming 15 Teaching School 20 The Wild West 21 Why a Hotel? 22 2. The Pritchard Family 25 T.T. and Bette Pritchard 28 Alice 30 Addie 31 Jennie 33 Clara 34 Cort 35 Lucy 36 Irl 38 Kathryn Noll Weintz 39 3. Conclusion 40 Childhood Memories by Clara Pritchard McGary Addendum – genealogy charts, newspaper articles, more images Fourth edition, September, 2017 Made possible with much help from my collaborator husband, David Dronsick, and other family members including Paul Huey, Jo Reilly, William and Mary Jane Pritchard, Tim McGary, Vicki McGary Tollman, Vernon McGary, my Kennedy cousins, the Mercer family, Gene Mergy, Emily Pritchard Cary, Judy Douglas, and David Scott. This fourth edition of “The Pritchards of Hyattville, Wyoming” is in the collection of the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne, the Washakie Museum in Worland, the history room in the Hyattville Community Center, and the Ritchie County Historical Society in West Virginia. 4 1. Why Wyoming and Hyattville? A framed Pritchard family portrait has occupied the top of our bookcase for many years. Taken in the early 1900s, my great grandparents, Thomas Tavner (T.T.) and Lucy Ann Elizabeth Pritchard (Bette), sit surrounded by their family of seven children… Jennie, Addie (my grandmother), Alice, Clara, Lucy, Cort, and Irl. After we returned from a 2015 nostalgic trip to Wyoming where they had lived, many thoughts about them started floating around in my brain. I began wondering why they had left West Virginia in 1907 for a little town in the middle of Wyoming where they built and ran a small rooming house/hotel. I decided to do some research on the family to turn them into real people with a real story to tell. Thus began a trail to unearth more information as my husband, David, and I dove into their world. Wyoming…Historical Context So, why would the family make the big move away from their home for generations on Slab Creek in the Union District of Ritchie County, West Virginia and journey all the way to Hyattville, Wyoming? What was their motivation, what was going on in West Virginia, and what was so attractive about Wyoming? We felt the need to look first at the very broad earlier historical context. The Oregon Trail had been heavily used through southern Wyoming from 1840 to 1867 by people headed not for Wyoming, but for points farther west. The travelers did not want to stop in Wyoming, because it seemed so dry and barren. Indian wars lasted into the 1870s. The Homestead Act of 1862 and the arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad to some parts of Wyoming in 1867 brought more settlers. By the late 1870s Wyoming had become a center for cattlemen. Busts in the cattle industry followed booms, and the sheep business in the state became the largest in the nation for wool production by the early 1900s. But, Wyoming was still thinly populated, and the Big Horn Basin was one of the very last pockets of the frontier to be settled. Except for occasional explorers, hunters, and trappers, it wasn’t until the early 1880s that the isolated Hyattville area even began to have white settlers. The town was first called Paint Rock, named by the Indians because of the rock colors by the creek. It was located near a 750 foot long sandstone cliff covered with pictographs made by Paleo-Indian people from as early as 10,000 years ago. By 1887 the town became known as Hyattville, named after Samuel W. Hyatt who established a post office and a general store there.1 Hyattville was one of the largest towns in the Basin at the time, with ranching as the main occupation, sine the landscape conditions and grass made a good fit for cattle and sheep. In nearby Bonanza in 1889, exaggerated accounts of endless oil and coal deposits were being extolled in the newspapers. Government sponsored irrigation was starting to change the landscape and the Mormons were also digging irrigation ditches in the Big Horn Basin to help grow their crops. 1 Paintrock Tales and Bonanza Trails by the Hyattville History Committee p. 3-5, p.27 5 Railroads Picture taken from the C.B.& Q. Railroad map (circa 1906) owned by T.T. Pritchard In Wyoming, expansion and promotion by the railroads was exerting a huge influence. The railroads were reaching farther into the state, making it easier to settle on the cheap or free land that could be obtained by homesteading and making “improvements.” Their heavy promotion designed to attract people to use the railroad and move to the Big Horn Basin was reaching eastward, including to West Virginia. Around the same time, the Mormons were sending promotion to West Virginia and other locations back east, offering incentives for needed workers.2 The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad connection from Frannie, Wyoming began in 1905, moving south along the Big Horn River through Greybull, arriving in Basin on June 19th and in Worland on July 10th, 1906. Between 1906 and 1913 the CB&Q operated an “Immigration Bureau” and “Land Seekers Information Bureau” under the leadership of D. Clem Deaver to lure settlers to take up land near the Big Horn Basin’s new irrigation projects, knowing that would bring more revenue from passengers and freight to the railroad. The publicity brought an estimated 8,000 families to the Basin, and also drew tourists to the region who came by train.3 From 1900 to 1905, even in anticipation of the railroads, population in the county more than doubled.4 The timing of the Pritchards’ arrivals in 1906 and 1907 was perfectly concurrent with this population explosion as the railroad was being extended from town to town through the Big Horn Basin.