Showing posts with label Burlington Wyoming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burlington Wyoming. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2016

Meeting the Mental Image: The RG Barn

The RG Barn



The reason I'm posting this here is that not only is this ranch yard exceptionally attractive, it's about the only Wyoming ranch yard I've ever seen that actually meets the Hollywood mental image of a ranch yard.

The barn, with the founding date of the ranch under the brand, is the text book version of a barn. The ranch house, which I negligently failed to photograph, is a huge old-fashioned ranch house.  An attractive late 19th Century house, it's a perfect cube in shape (two stories) with a covered porch that goes all the way around the house.  Very nice.  

Even the cows looked perfectly content.

I'm only noting this as the mental impression was so significant, that it really stands out.  I'm not criticizing other Wyoming ranches by any means, but this ranch that borders the town of Burlington (this yard literally is on a Burlington street) is really unique in this fashion.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Distances in rural areas, Churches of the West: Unknown abandoned church, Otto Wyoming

A long time ago on this blog I had a couple of items about local churches, noting the many Catholic churches that exist in downtown Denver serving what had once been distinct ethic neighborhoods. A post I made earlier this week on churches on one of our other blogs; Churches of the West: Unknown abandoned church, Otto Wyoming: calls to mind something similar, if not identical.  The big change in the practicality of distances in rural life.


Those photographs depict an abandoned church in Otto Wyoming, a very small Wyoming farm town in the Big Horn Basin.  I don't know anything about the history of the church at all, other than that it once existed and based on a reference I found to it, it was at there at least as early as the 1920s.


Now Otto is just a few miles from Burlington (eleven miles) and Basin (twelve miles).  Both Basin and Burlington are larger towns, which isn't to say that they're enormous by any means.

 
General store in Burlington Wyoming.

 
 Big Horn County Courthouse, Basin Wyoming.

Basin is the more substantial of the two, and is the county seat.  Basin isn't far from Greybull, another fairly small town, and Worland, a much larger town.

Now, Basin and Burlington all have churches.  Burlington, however, is quite limited in those regards, at least at the present time.  It has an Episcopal and a Mormon church.  Basin, on the other hand, has a larger representation of denominations.


St. Philip's Catholic Church & ELCA Peace Lutheran Fellowship, Basin Wyoming, while joint use of a church is unusual, nearby Thermopolis Wyoming has a combined Presbyterian and Methodist congregation  Currently the  Catholic community is being served by the nearby church in Greybull, however, and Masses are apparently not being offered here at the present time.  
 

Now, their could be a lot of explanations for this, but still you have to wonder when it was that tiny Otto required its own church?  Perhaps the denomination of the church explained it.  Or perhaps 11 or so miles was a long ways not all that long ago, really.  Certainly, eleven miles by horse or cart is a very long ways, particularly if you have to turn around and go back the other way, and that's even if the weather is nice.  And eleven miles by Model T isn't a short trip either.