Casper’s Grant Street Grocery: How A 105-Year-Old Wyoming Neighborhood Grocery Store Was Saved

Lindsey Grant grew up in Casper, but never knew there was a neighborhood grocery store with her name on it until she was in her 20s.

Grant Street Grocery is its name, and it’s turning 105 years old this year.

“They sold fun cheeses and crackers,” Grant recalled. “They had special events. It was so unique.”

The store was love at first sight for Grant, and quickly became a favorite stop.

But the aging store’s infrastructure was slowly but surely giving way, and Grant feared Casper’s last neighborhood grocery was going to disappear, along with a unique piece of history.

“It just needed a lot of attention,” Grant said. “It was in such disrepair.”

That brought Grant and four friends, all of whom had met through the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra, together with a common purpose.

Save Grant Street Grocery.

Oil Boom Built It

In 1913, Casper was in an oil boom that would last well into the next decade. Major oil companies came to what would become known as “The Oil City,” bringing people, which doubled the town’s population within five years, and cash that quickly inflated the city’s economy.

Neighborhood stores like Grant Street Grocery were soon common, and by 1923, there were 60 of them. E.R. Williams was among investors building out these stores. He raised several from 1915 to 1921, including Grant Street Grocery in 1918.

But after World War I, he, like many others, was struggling financially in the midst of a depression. He leased the Grant Street Grocery to Arthur L. LaClair in 1926, who eventually bought it.

LaClair was not afraid to travel to bring the highest quality that he could to his store. He went south of Buffalo in search of high-quality pork and to Sheridan for butter. He brought cottage cheese in from Seattle. During the holidays, he would drive all the way to Lusk for hand-picked turkeys that he would deliver to customers ahead of Thanksgiving.

Fresh flowers were available at the store as well, and every child who entered the grocery got his or her own cookie. LaClair soon became known as the “Cookie Man.”

Eventually, LaClair built a chicken house on the back of Grant Street Grocery to fatten, butcher and dress his own chickens and turkeys. That also allowed the store to offer fresh eggs.

In the 30s, during the Great Depression, the LaClairs added a bakery to their enterprise. That helped them achieve stability in a time of great economic uncertainty.

New Life For Old Store

Eventually, Grant Street Grocery was bought by Bill and Nancy Wayte in 2004.

They focused on a selection of specialty items and gourmet sandwiches, and added an imported cheese line. But behind the scenes, the grocery’s infrastructure was slowly but surely giving way.

That was the situation when Grant and her partners — Terry and Del Johnson, and Doug and Susan Holmes — bought Grant Street Grocery in 2016, just two years shy of its 100th anniversary.

Their goal, in simple terms, was another 100 years of life for their neighborhood favorite.

“It was the last neighborhood grocery store in Casper,” Grant told Cowboy State Daily. “And, I believe, in the entire state. I haven’t come across anything similar to it in my travels and my time in Wyoming.”

Putting in all new infrastructure — water, sewer and HVAC — were among the first steps they took. The more important and difficult part of the rescue was re-envisioning the store to create an economically viable niche. 

“When we purchased it, it had three sorts of things it did well,” Grant said. “It had a butcher department, a cheese department and a small sandwich menu.”

The group decided to keep all of those things going, but expand on them. 

“We added soups, and we change our menu every quarter now,” Grant said.

There are also more sandwiches on the menu now, and there’s a coffee bar, along with all kinds of different sodas to choose from, including a moderate-carb Mexican fermented variety.

A pretty patio area offers a place to enjoy Grant Street Grocery purchases on the spot, if preferred. 

After that, Grant and Holmes looked at what else their new store could do that no one else was in Casper. That led them to a fancy food show in New York.

Thousands Of Samples

The cool thing about the food show in New York is that it was a venue where Holmes and Grant could try not just hundreds of different food products in one place, but thousands.

“We wanted to meet the makers, and we wanted to try the food before we bought it,” Grant recalled. “Because you know, we didn’t want to buy it and be like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s terrible.’”

Every item on their shelves needs to be something too good to resist.

“So, my partner Susan Holmes and I went to New York for four days and we just ate,” Grant recalled. “We sampled, you know, chocolate and chips and mustard. I mean, it was the craziest thing.”

With an area as large as four football fields stuffed with hundreds of food vendors, each offering dozens of products, it took every one of those four days to get through it all.

“A cracker company would have eight or 12 flavors and jam companies would have, you know, six to 10, and some bigger companies would have, like, 40 different things,” Grant said. “We couldn’t try them all, but we could get a good idea each day that here are some things that we really like.”

By the end of their trip, they had collected so many samples they had to buy a big suitcase to carry them all home.

“We still have soda and other products on our shelves that we first found at the fancy food show,” Grant said.

Shopping The World Online

Grant and Holmes have not repeated that particular New York experience, but they’re still looking for the world’s most unique and tasty products for their store. 

Grant has found she can find a lot of these interesting products by following social media foodies. And any time she goes on a trip, she checks out similar neighborhood grocery stores to see what they’re carrying.

“There’s this really great place down in Austin, Texas, called the Tiny Grocer,” she said. “I dragged all my friends to the Tiny Grocer in Austin because they were a similar aesthetic to what we’re doing. And I just introduced myself to the owner of the shop and said, ‘Hey, what’s your favorite stuff in the store? What are your best sellers?’”

She took pictures of those products and, after returning to Wyoming, contacted the companies to see which she could bring to Casper.

Grant is open to carrying Wyoming products too, but they have to meet the same federal standards her store is required to follow.

“I do have a lot of makers from the United States, and we also look at what’s happening in Europe. We have fun bringing in wonderful cheeses, and you know, jams from the UK, or Italian pestos and pasta,” she said. “It’s really fun to try to just curate a variety of things for people to make some really nice dinners or lunches or give gifts and housewarming presents.”

Contact Renée Jean at Renee@CowboyStateDaily.com