The Builder of the “World’s Oldest Cabin”
By Phil Roberts
It is billed as “the world’s oldest cabin.” The structure, made of fossilized dinosaur bones, stands on the Carbon-Albany County line just east of Medicine Bow.
Even though the “construction blocks” are ancient, the cabin itself dates only from about 1932 or 1933 when Thomas Boylan, owner of the adjacent service stop, assembled it from bones he’d been collecting for some 15 years.
Born in Humboldt County, California, in 1863, Boylan came to Wyoming in 1892, working for sheep companies near Lander and, later, serving as manager for a large Medicine Bow area sheep ranch owned by Sam Johnson. He left that job in 1904 and became foreman for the Toltec Cattle Company near Rock River.
In 1908, he filed for a homestead not far from Como Bluff where dinosaurs had been discovered almost a half century earlier. In 1916, he began collecting dinosaur bones.
In consultation with UW dinosaur specialists, Boylan intended to piece the bones together and erect them as “sculptures” near where he planned to operate a station along the Lincoln Highway passing next to his homestead. After 17 years of collecting, he had 5,796 bones (weighing 102,116 pounds).
The UW dinosaur expert told him the fossilized bones were from varied species and there appeared to be no complete specimen in the entire pile.
“At first I planned to get enough of them together to mount a complete dinosaur skeleton,” he told a reporter in 1938, “however, erecting such a skeleton is a long and costly task for an individual to undertake so I abandoned the idea and proceeded to use them the best way I could.”
Helped by his young son, Boylan began building the 29 feet long, 19-foot wide cabin in 1932. The two completed the job in time for the “tourist season” the next year. Travelers in the summer of 1933 admired the unique building. Near the cabin, Boylan operated a service station. Briefly, during the 1930s, he supervised the nearby state fish hatchery although the tourist business was his main source of income.
In the winter of 1935-36, Boylan had postcards printed. He called the site “Como Bluff Dinosaurium,” but often referred to it simply as the “fossil cabin.” The UW American Heritage Center and the Wyoming State Archives photographic section hold numerous photographs of the structure in the early days.
The site gained national attention when on April 26, 1938, Robert L. Ripley ran a “cartoon” of the cabin in his nationally syndicated feature, “Believe It or Not.” Ripley called it the “world’s oldest cabin.” Boylan erected a sign describing the Ripley designation, but he also variously called the cabin, the “Creation Museum,” the “World’s Oldest Building,” and even the “Building That Used to Walk.”
Business apparently remained good because the fossil cabin stood along a heavily-traveled tourist route, U. S. Highway 30. Boylan’s business survived the Great Depression and the World War II years, as traffic steadily increased along the main east-west corridor across the middle of America.
The Boylans employed one young Japanese-American man in 1940–F. Kageyama. During World War II, when Americans of Japanese descent were under suspicion throughout the West, the Boylans hired several other young men who had lost their jobs with the Union Pacific Railroad because of their Japanese ethnicity. A neighbor recalled how people were told that the men were “Samoan” to avoid any encounter from those who held hostile anti-Japanese views–unfortunately, many people during wartime. Both the U. S. Census and the “Registration List of Aliens Living in Albany County,” furnished to Gov. Nels Smith by Sheriff Ed Wood the week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, clearly identifies them as “Japanese aliens.”
Boylan died in October, 1947. Over the following two decades, Boylan’s widow Grayce operated the gasoline stop and fossil museum cabin. Suddenly in the late 1960s, traffic dropped dramatically along Highway 30 with construction of Interstate 80, leaving the route mostly to traffic between Casper and Laramie.
Nearby towns like Bosler, Rock River and Medicine Bow diminished in size as many of the service stations catering to highway traffic closed. Like Boylan’s “Fossil Cabin” station, stops in the road like Coyote Springs and Wild Bill’s catered to the traveling public. The popular road-side stop of “Wild Bill’s,” north of Rock River, featured a petting zoo and convenience stop. Popular actress Judy Tyler and her actor husband died in a car crash on July 3, 1957, right in front of the spot. Soon after “Wild Bill’s” burned and was not rebuilt. (Tyler was returning East after filming “Jailhouse Rock” opposite Elvis Presley).
Meanwhile, up the road closer to Medicine Bow, the fossil cabin remained open as a museum. Grayce Boylan sold the fossil cabin in 1974 to Jodie and Paul Fultz. The structure, still privately owned, remains”the world’s oldest cabin.”
Printed Sources: “Registration List of Japanese Aliens Living in Albany County,” Sheriff Ed Wood of Albany County to Gov. Nels Smith on Dec. 13, 1941, in Nels Smith Papers, 9880, Box 3, File “Correspondence re: Japanese Internment, 1941,” Folder 4. The list states the names as: “K. Kumagai and Mrs. K. Kumagai, Como, Wyo UP Employee. F. Kageyama, Employed Boylands (sic) Filling Station, Ridge, Wyoming.. G. Miyamoto, Mrs. G. Miyamoto, U. P. Section at Ridge, live Medicine Bow.”