History Come Alive: San Diego Man Discovers Documents About 140-Year-Old Cheyenne Building

If the 1884 walls at Bohemian Metals could talk, oh the tales they’d tell.

The store’s owner, Brian P. Snyder, has a few tantalizing remnants of that history. Photographs of the A. Underwood Bro. Grocers that used to call the building home, but most of its history seemed destined to remain a mystery, until one day out of the blue he got a message from a San Diego history buff named Mike Hennessy.

The message included a photo of the A. Underwood & Bro. Grocers as it looked in early-day Cheyenne. It was a beautiful two-story, red brick building that housed three businesses on one foundation. Hence its nickname, Trinity Block.

“I think Bohemian Metals occupies the third of the original building on the far left of the photo, while the other two-thirds of the building has been remodeled and occupied by the Knights of Pythias and the comic store,” Hennessy wrote. “Much of the architectural detail seems to match up with a lot of your store, just based solely on this old photo.”

Indeed, it was an exact match.

But what really caught Snyder’s attention was the newspaper article that Hennessy sent with the photo.

It explained how three entities came together in 1884 to replace some old adobe rubble at the location and revitalize that corner of Cheyenne. These entities were the Knights of Pythias, C.P. Justus and A. Underwood.

“I used to think this whole building was Knights of Pythias,” Snyder told Cowboy State Daily. “But it was actually all three of the entities combining resources to construct three buildings on one foundation, which I assume saved money.”

Treasure In A Flimsy Shopping Bag

Hennessy started his journey through time, chasing his great-great-grandfather Abraham Underwood to Wyoming, after his mom gave him a shopping bag full of paper scraps and photographs. She was cleaning stuff out for a remodeling job.

“It was just this total treasure trove of stuff,” Hennessy told Cowboy State Daily. “There were a ton of pictures and poetry that family members wrote and then photos of Abraham Underwood.”

It was about 2,000 pages from various eras, an avalanche of history that had no real order.

Hennessy would dip into the bag now and again when he had some free time, pulling out a page here and a photo there, each one a brand-new rabbit hole to dive into.

Eventually, he came to the Underwood photos and documents and found more than just a rabbit hole. It was a labyrinth of history.

“I noticed there was an Underwood store in this (newspaper) photograph, so I think obviously he must have been a clerk,” Hennessy said. “Because I don’t think there’s too many A. Underwoods in Cheyenne.”

Ultimately, Hennessy found so many articles over a 45-year period from 1865 to 1910 that he could piece together a fascinating picture of his ancestor in Wyoming, and it is the untold tale of a self-made man in Cheyenne, the Magic City of the Plains.

The Travails Of Underwood

Newspapers of the day weren’t like today’s reports, so focused on a big, stunning picture. They had country correspondents at the time, who would write about the neighbors and their pursuits, no matter how small and trivial.

These correspondents wrote about Underwood’s successful fishing trips, as well as a not-so-successful one in 1871, where Underwood accidentally shot himself through the wrist. The bullet got away, this time, instead of the fish, much to Underwood’s chagrin.

There’s also a paragraph about a nefarious geranium thief, exhorting the individual to at least return the largest pot of geraniums or face prosecution. And there’s a paragraph extolling a high-society, dinner-theater party held in Underwood’s home in 1879, where youths put on a show called “The Duchess of Dublin” to raise money for the M.E. Church.

In 1880, one article recounts the theft of a horse belonging to J.C. Horton and a saddle belonging to Underwood. There’s also a funny 1885 tale about a team of runaway horses stopped by a pile of Underwood’s hapless potatoes.

“A team belonging to Frank Malone ran yesterday morning from the Haas blacksmith shop on Thomes Street, down to the corner of Eddy and Seventeenth streets, where it left part of the wagon in front of Joseph La Rose’s meat market,” reads an April 16 newspaper article.” “The horses then ran along the sidewalk of the K. of P. block, where underwood Bros. had a large lot of potatoes in sacks on the walk. The horses fell over these and were secured. The damage was not serious.”

The Magic City Of Self-Made Men

That’s the kind of color that fascinates Hennessy and it’s one of the reasons he loves history.

But it’s also been fun to set Underwood’s story into the greater context of what was happening in the country at the time, and in Cheyenne in particular.

In 1867, Cheyenne was an end of the tracks railroad town with big aspirations. People thought it was going to be another Chicago or maybe even the capitol of America.

Underwood arrived in Cheyenne in 1870 It was just the other side of a bust that occurred when the end of the tracks followers and hangers-on rolled out of Cheyenne into Laramie, and just one year ahead of Horace Greeley’s optimistic “Go West, young man” letter, urging Americans in general to seek their fortunes — or at least a better life — in a place where jobs are not “bestowed as alms.”

Underwood had already figured this idea out, and it’s a tale that’s chronicled in bits and pieces here and there through the Cheyenne newspapers of the day.

Underwood’s beginnings were rather humble, according to those accounts. He’d started in a small grocery store with a partner, A.G. McGregor, but eventually came to own one of Cheyenne’s finest grocery markets.

“Cheyenne is a city of self-made men,” One newspaper article of the day reads. “Every man here that has been engaged in legitimate business and attended to it strictly has now a good competence, if not a comfortable fortune. No better illustration of this statement can be found than the success of the Underwood Brothers, the well-known grocerymen.”

Let’s Go Shopping At Underwood’s

Underwood’s store, over time, had several names. At one point, it was the “Cheap Cash Store.” But the name he ultimately settled on was A. Underwood & Bro. Groceries. The “s” was removed after one brother’s interest in the enterprise waned.

The store carried a remarkable variety of goods from “California, the Erie, Niagara and Genesee preserving districts of New York,” according to ads for the store that Hennessy has found.

There were also sacks of staples like flour, salt and sugar.

It had a cellar that ran the length of the store for syrup and apples.

And, of course, those potatoes that a horse stumbled over in 1885.

Underwood had so many ads, even Hennessy was a little overwhelmed.

“There’s just a ton,” he said. “Eggs from Colorado, fruits and vegetables from California — all sorts of things. Like firewood, too, and just goods that people could use.”

There are also articles about Underwood’s unsuccessful attempt to start a coal business in Denver, which lasted all of five to six months, and the second shop he opened in the Black Hills during a gold rush.

Mysteries To Come

Underwood history is still being revealed, and it’s been fun for both Hennessy and Snyder to fill in some of the blanks about the building that houses Bohemian Metals, a third of what was known in the 1880s as the Trinity Block.

“I had pictures and such and his name and first initials, but that was it,” Snyder said. “I didn’t know his first name or his wife or brother’s information.”

Coolest of all, though, is how it’s illuminating the story of one of America’s early settlers, who helped build the West and Cheyenne. One of the many unsung heroes of early America.

“I like that he was successful after starting with nothing,” Snyder said.

Hennessy plans to continue mining old newspaper clippings about his ancestor, picking up with the 1890s next, hoping to discover more about why Underwood headed West and why he chose Cheyenne.

“It’s hard to know what Abraham’s (thinking), why he would go from Wisconsin to Wyoming,” he said. “Maybe it was profits, I don’t know. But there’s a reason and it’s probably a compelling one. I know there’s a lot more out there to be found.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.