The portico over the door of the Niobrara County Courthouse in Lusk, Wyoming, is as relevant to the national scene as it was when it went up in the early 20th century: “A Public Office is a Public Trust.” And the building was once topped by a statue of “justice” on the roof.
When we moved to town, we lived about two blocks away, across Main on Pine St., in what was called the “Larson” house. Steve and I walked to school past the courthouse every day. I found some notes I made for an oral history I did of my mom for the Archives years ago. There are brief mentions of the courthouse where she worked in the 1930s and 1940s. Mom quoted O.P. Harnigal (sp?) saying that the statue came down “long ago” (about 1930) and had been stored in a cave the county owned until it went into an early WWII scrap metal drive–an incident that apparently, most people in Lusk were aware of…. Irony of “justice” going to war.
Sometimes, war profiteers cashed in before and even during the war, not unlike the tRump family today. A well respected Casper businessman made a fortune selling the rails from the abandoned (bankrupt) North-South railroad to the Japanese just before WWII. (I’m told spikes from several abandoned sections of the original Union Pacific line northwest of Laramie were “recycled” by Boy Scouts and other groups scouring the ground during county scrap metal drives. When in recent years, I taught the History of Wyoming Railroads, the class walked along some abandoned segments of original transcontinental railroad route. Several students spotted spike fragments along one stretch that became a county road.
Far away to the west from Lusk and north of the site of the Transcontinental Railroad, a curator at South Pass City told me that the mining equipment at the Carissa Mine and elsewhere in the vicinity did not go to scrap because, as historic as it was, it was still in use! On top of that, removing all of that heavy “scrap” and hauling it off to be melted down and re-used would have taken more gasoline (rationed), manpower, wear and tear on trucks, their tires, engines and gears that it would not have been positive for “saving.” When one drives into the state historic site now (on paved roads), one can imagine what a challenge it was once was to get there on unpaved roads, especially in the winter!
