Anyone who’s driven across southern Wyoming along Interstate 80 has seen him. He towers over the road at an altitude of 8,640 feet atop Sherman Hill just east of Laramie.
The giant head of Abraham Lincoln has his gaze forever focused downward, as if watching the cars and trucks speed by, or perhaps his stern countenance is a warning to slow down on the steep grade on both sides of the mountain pass.
Whatever message this 42.5-foot-high memorial to the nation’s 16th president may be trying to communicate, what’s reciprocated is usually close to the same. What the heck does Lincoln have to do with Wyoming and why would there be a memorial to him here?
He was assassinated 25 years before Wyoming became a state, and he’s famous for growing up in Kentucky, then leading the United States through the Civil War, all a long way from what would later become the Cowboy State.
Westward Ho!
Turns out, the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument is in recognition of more than a president, it’s also symbolic for the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental highway that opened Oct. 31, 1913.
Following the Union Pacific railroad route from the east to the West Coast, the highway opened road travel across the U.S. Before too long, there were hundreds of roads crisscrossing the United States, prompting a numbering convention to name them to avoid confusion.
That’s how the Lincoln Highway became U.S. Highway 30, which crossed through southern Wyoming. Later, when Interstate 80 was punched through, it followed some of the old Lincoln Highway route.
The truth is, there were many versions of Lincoln Highway through Wyoming.
“Most of Wyoming contains three or four alternative Lincoln Highways,” according to an article about the highway published by the Wyoming Historical Society.
The cross-state and cross-country travel also sparked and explosion of business along the highway as towns tried to capitalize on these pass-through visitors.
Wyoming artist Robert Russin with the giant bust of Abraham Lincoln he designed. The 12.5-foot bust was placed on a 30-foot pillar of granite and now sits at the top of Sherman Hill along Interstate 80 just east of Laramie. (Courtesy Bill Sniffin) 
This map shows the original route of the Lincoln Highway in 1913. (Federal Highway Administration) 
Payson Spaulding, an Evanston, Wyoming, attorney with Lincoln Highway Association dedicates a monument on U.S. Highway 30 west of Creston to Henry Joy 1938. The Joy monument was moved to the rest area at the top of Sherman Hill along Interstate 80 in 2001 to be near the Lincoln Memorial there. Joy had wanted to be buried there, but some of his ashes were put inside the Lincoln Memorial. (American Heritage Center)
But Why A Memorial?
It wasn’t until decades later that a memorial to the former president and namesake of the highway began to take form.
Dr. Charles W. Jeffrey of Rawlins was a wealthy landowner at the time who agreed to finance the memorial, and Robert Russin, a well-known Wyoming artist and sculptor, was commissioned to create the monument.
It would consist of a 12.5-foot bust on a 30-foot pillar of Wyoming granite and was unveiled at the summit of Highway 30 between Cheyenne and Laramie in 1959 to mark the 150th birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
A decade later in 1969, it was moved about a mile to its current location along I-80.
The bust of Lincoln was cast in bronze in Mexico City, and it took nearly a year to transport it to Wyoming. It remains one of the heaviest bronze sculptures in the United States. It’s also grounded with lightning rods in to help ensure it won’t explode if hit during one of Wyoming’s famous thunderstorms.
Want to know what the heck something is in Wyoming? Ask Managing Editor Greg Johnson and he’ll try to find out. Send your “What the heck is …” questions to him, along with high-quality horizontal photos of whatever it is to Greg@CowboyStateDaily.com.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
