By Phil Roberts
The townsite of Buffalo was once almost entirely owned by a widow. Her late husband had the foresight to file a desert claim on the land while he was serving at nearby Fort McKinney in the early 1880s.
The fort had been located in the summer of 1878 when the army moved a camp from the Powder River area to the banks of Clear Creek. With the construction of the fort, civilians came in the area to obtain contracts from the government for provisioning the new post. Unable to stay on the military reservation, they established their own camps along the creek east of the fort. Saloons were not allowed on the military reservation so they sprung up just outside the boundaries, too.
During the fall of 1879, August Trabing, who owned stores in Medicine Bow, Laramie and other towns, moved his trading post from the Powder River area to Buffalo. Soon after, he sold out to Joseph Conrad and his partners. The next summer the first Occidental Hotel was constructed and other buildings began to go up.
The story goes that it was at this time that Main Street was laid out—in a most unusual way. Joseph Conrad had noticed that wherever the bull team outfits from the fort passed, a road would become established. He offered one teamster, George Washbaugh, a new suit if he would alter his route slightly and pass by the Conrad store. The curves in Main Street were there to stay after Washbaugh took the detour past the store.
For some inexplicable reason, builders failed to bother to purchase land on which they built. Apparently, they didn’t even check to see who owned the land. The buildings had been constructed on the desert claim of Major Verling K. Hart, post commander at Fort McKinney, a Civil War veteran who was breveted a major for his service in the battle of Chicamauga.
Hart, who had become involved in mining investments when he was commanding officer at Fort Laramie (and the namesake of the town of Hartville on the site of one mine), had made the claim almost as soon as he had arrived. The Indiana-born soldier died of a heart seizure at the age of 44 the next year. His widow, Juliet W. Hart, became the claim owner. A native of Michigan, Mrs. Hart was only 32 when her husband died.
A controversy soon developed between Mrs. Hart and the owners of the buildings that stood on her claim. Although the details of the negotiations are unclear, the Carbon County Journal reported on Sept. 29, 1883, that: “It is now thought that all the trouble about the townsite of Buffalo is over, as Mrs. Hart has signed the agreement drawn up by the citizens, in which she agrees to sell all lots now occupied at $10 each. It is to be hoped that there will be no more trouble in this direction.”
Mrs. Hart was granted the patent on the land in June 1884 and, a month later, she platted the original townsite of Buffalo. It was by then a flourishing town.
The Johnson County deed records show almost 250 entries for sales of land by Mrs. Hart to various Buffalo settlers in the next few years. One interesting entry for August 1884 is the deed to the County Commissioners for a piece of land where the Johnson County Courthouse still stands. The sale price was $512.
Mrs. Hart stayed in Buffalo for several years after her husband’s untimely death. She and her three children may have moved to Fort Robinson, Nebr., about 1889. Later, deeds list her as living in Lee County, Iowa, and Detroit, Michigan. Even though she was absent, she continued to sell town lots in Buffalo from time to time.
Her son gained fame as the first Wyoming appointee to have graduated from West Point. Verling K. Hart, Jr., born in 1871, in Kansas, had been brought to Wyoming when his father was transferred to Wyoming in the late 1870s. Joseph M. Carey, Wyoming’s territorial delegate to Congress, named the younger Hart to West Point in 1889.
After service in the Spanish American War in both Cuba and the Philippines, he returned to Wyoming in 1906 to serve at Fort D. A. Russell. According to the West Point annual reunion book of 1915, he was discharged from the army for disability in 1910. He became a partner in a hotel enterprise in Cheyenne. He died in Cheyenne June 20, 1914, and his body was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Cheyenne. (In 1930, his son, also Verling K. Hart, was listed in the U. S. Census as living in Charlotte, N.C., but his name does not appear in records after that).
Juliet W. Hart, former owner of the townsite of Buffalo, died in Washington, D. C., on June 10, 1909. She was laid to rest next to her husband in Oakland Cemetery, Keokok, Iowa.