Clock Ticking For 133-Year-Old Cheyenne Pumphouse, Which Needs $4M Restoration

CHEYENNE — It's disheveled, but still proud, with clean lines built of red, Ashlar-cut sandstone blocks that historical records suggest were carted in from the Horsetooth Reservoir.

It’s the same red sandstone that was used to build the historic Cheyenne Depot. And it’s the same Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, characterized by a grand, monumental appearance that draws from Roman antiquity.

That architecture has helped make the former Union Pacific Depot a focal point in Cheyenne’s downtown. Unlike the Depot, which was restored in the early 2000s, Cheyenne’s Historic Pumphouse hasn’t found a champion yet.

It needs someone willing to spend the $4 million it will take to restore the building to its former glory.

Weeds have sprung up all around the pumphouse like some crazy, cast-aside wig, hair all akimbo and pointing at the sky. Hair that’s made of wispy sprigs of grass intermingled with spiky, tall plants that look like mullein in bloom on some alien world. 

Glorious sunflowers adorn this wild wig with heads bowing to the sun, along with some dark purple shrub around the corner that looks a bit like a miniature forest of ruby lettuce.

Looking at the wildness of the space, it’s impossible not to feel like a trespasser — even while standing there with Cheyenne City Project Manager Paul Belotti. 

“This is actually the back of the pumphouse,” he said, gesturing at the scene. “And where we are standing used to be a reservoir that went all the way out to Lincoln.”

Water flowed into that shallow reservoir from Crow Creek each and every day, sent out to Cheyenne residents at need, whenever they turned on their taps.

At certain times of the day, 5 p.m. being one of them, bells would ring to advise residents of higher water pressure. That 5 p.m. bell was a signal to water all the fancy, green grass lawns in what would become Wyoming’s state capital.

From What A Cosmopolitan City Needs …

The Historic Pumphouse was built in 1892 for a city that was growing so fast and so well, it had earned the nickname Magic City of the Plains. 

Having a municipal water system of this caliber put Cheyenne on a par with some of the biggest, best cities in America, according to Historic Cheyenne Inc. Vice President Maren Kallas, who has been researching the facility’s history.

“They were very proud of it when it opened,” she said. “They called it a veritable young depot. To have a municipal water system like that meant you were a real cosmopolitan city.”

It was a time when many people had never so much as seen a bathtub, Kallas added. 

Wyoming had been a state for just two years in 1892, and many still considered it part of the frontier. Cheyenne, meanwhile, had seemed to appear from nowhere, like an overnight pop-up city. 

“This was like a really new, modern thing to have city water,” Kallas said. “That’s what was so unique about Cheyenne was that we were quite cosmopolitan. We had opera houses, a lot of different languages were spoken here, and people came from all over the world via rail.”

The pumphouse wasn’t Cheyenne’s first. It was actually its second. The city had outgrown its first in just over a decade.

“The population just kept growing and growing,” Kallas said. “They built the first pumphouse over where the State Library is at 28th and Central.”

It didn’t provide enough water pressure to put out fires, and the untreated water both tasted and smelled bad. It was not going to do for the reputation Cheyenne wanted to build.

“So, they built the new pumphouse along the banks of Crow Creek, in the same architectural style as the depot,” Kallas said. “They took a lot of pride in it, and they made great improvements to it.”

… To A Society Nuisance

The new pumphouse had filter beds to clean the water, and the water pressure was greatly improved. Newspaper articles waxed poetic about how she was laying a foundation for Cheyenne’s bright future, in terms so lurid and fond, it’s hard to imagine how she has come to such a neglected state today.

Homeless people now sneak into her once proud shelter at night, seeking respite from Wyoming’s wind and storms.

“I come in here with one of the compliance guys, and we clean it out about once a month,” Belotti said, gesturing to debris and worn-out tennis balls and baseballs that have mysteriously appeared. “All this happened in the last three weeks or so.”

Belotti returns every few days between cleanings, to discourage people from moving stuff in. That’s what it takes to keep them from reoccupying the space.

The problem is worse during winter, Belotti added. People even build fires to keep themselves warm.

That’s made her a nuisance to civilized society. One the city has decided it must do something about.

A Hollow Space

Inside, the pumphouse is dark and hollow. Echoes are sucked quickly into her silence, leaving only the graffiti on the walls to speak.

Most of the script isn’t all that legible. They are partial messages written in fancy letters with words that don’t quite make sense.

The clearest of these messages is written in white ghost lettering either painted or chalked onto a rusty metal door that’s in the front of the building.

“Got a lot of time to waste when you’re getting wasted,” it says. 

It’s signed by someone named “Heddy,” along with the tagline, “wrong-way kidz.”

If this were a scene in a Gothic work of fiction, the message would be a cryptic warning of soul-sucking danger ahead. But it is a sunny September day in Cheyenne. We can ignore such messages and pass by the dark portal safe and sound, paying it no heed.

“There was a man who lived here with his family who ran this facility,” Belotti said, gesturing at the dusty interior with its ragged and peeling paint. “They had living quarters in here for them.”

It’s hard to imagine this space filling up with children’s laughter and all the other sounds that belong to families. 

There would have also been the sound of a giant Holly Duplex Steam Pump, working 24-7 to send water out across Cheyenne, as well as the sounds of coal being shoveled into it. 

Andy Artist, the first pumphouse engineer, is silent about all this, if he is haunting this place at all.

Escape Artist

There are lots of funny stories about Artist. Like newspaper articles that tell how he saved a cow from an oncoming train by getting the engineer’s attention in just the nick of time.

One of the more dramatic stories tells the tale of a sleepover gone wrong.

Artist and his daughter were in the living room with three of her friends, who’d come over for the sleepover. It was 9 p.m. and the girls were no doubt giggling, despite the late hour, while dad was probably grumbling that young girls needed to go to sleep.

A rushing roar of distant water drowned out their conversation and was on top of them within seconds. 

Artist and his daughter clamored up the dining room chairs to escape the flood, caused by a sudden storm that swelled the banks of the Crow Creek, sending rushing water their way. Her friends managed to escape, just barely, by ripping the screen door at its top and slipping out onto the roof. The door had been held tightly shut by the force of rushing water.

The floodwater climbed up to Artist and his daughter’s necks before finally subsiding, making it a terrifyingly close call for the family. 

Other families in Cheyenne weren’t so lucky, Kallas said, and there were newspaper articles written on anniversaries about the flood for decades to come. People talked about how it changed their lives and upended their families.

Artist was pumphouse engineer for just over a decade in all. But he still met an untimely end. His luck ran out, and he was found beaten and bloody after a barroom brawl in 1905. He died three days later.

The pumphouse continued to be the pride of Cheyenne for only five more years after that. By then, the city had already outgrown her.

A new and even larger facility was constructed near Roundtop, a newfangled, gravity-fed water system with roughly twice the capacity of the pumphouse.

The pumphouse transitioned to an auxiliary facility, augmenting water supply during times of high demand, like fires and Cheyenne Frontier Days. 

It was also useful for keeping the dust down on streets that were still dirt and gravel.

Rare Piece Of Cheyenne’s Origin Story

In the 1920s, the facility was completely decommissioned, useful as a pumphouse no more.

The Cheyenne Street Department acquired the facility sometime in the 1930s, and later added a metal shed, probably in the 1970s according to Kallas’ research so far. It served as both maintenance garage and storage shed. 

The metal additions prevented the facility from being listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Under the city of Cheyenne’s $4 million restoration plan, those newer, metal parts, would have to be removed, according to Belotti.

Cheyenne listed the pumphouse as a top priority in 2024, but the tide turned in 2025, with some councilors questioning the wisdom of spending so much to restore such an old building.

It was ultimately decided to put the facility up for sale — albeit with some restrictions — to see if a buyer could be found to take it on as a project instead, Belotti said.

Milward Simpson, who is chair of the Cheyenne’s Historic Preservation Board, said he is happy with the restrictions.

“It’s things like the purchaser is prohibited from demolishing the structure,” he said. “They’re prohibited from modifying or altering the exterior of the structure in any way that would make it ineligible for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. And then they also ensure the exterior renovation or restoration complies with the Secretary of the Interior’s historic property standards.”

That will ensure that any future buyer has a genuine interest in historic preservation, or adaptive reuse, Simpson added.

Simpson believes the property is absolutely worth saving.

“It’s a crucial part of what we like to call in the historic preservation world, adaptive reuse, where you adapt an old building and re-use it for new purposes to help the economy — like meeting spaces, restaurants, retail outlets, that kind of thing,” he said. “The pumphouse can be a really important part of that.”

It’s also a rare piece of Cheyenne’s pioneer origins story, one that engineer reports have said is still solid and can be saved. There aren’t too many pieces of Cheyenne’s origins left, Kallas said.

“We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the Crow Creek,” she said. “Cheyenne sprouted out of this water. The tent city sprang up on the banks of the Crow Creek.”

Time Running Out

If no buyer is found by January, then the pumphouse is likely to meet a wrecking ball, despite engineer analysis that find the 133-year-old building is still structurally sound.

So far, there have been inquiries about the facility, Belotti said. 

“I’ve had about six calls so far,” he said. “More than I expected to see.”

The sales process is waiting on an appraisal, after which bids will be taken for the building. Belotti expects the appraisal within a couple of weeks.

The building itself is amazing, Belotti added.

“This is a pumphouse, an industrial building,” he said, gesturing at the fancy cut stone. “Today we’d use tilt-up or precast concrete.”

The stonework, too, is a testament to the craftsmanship of the era. It’s lasted longer than some, more modern brick buildings.

Not saving it would be sad, Simpson said.

“Cheyenne still smarts from some old wounds at having unfortunately chosen to tear down similar structures,” he said. “The one that everybody points to, and current city council people will point to, is the old Carnegie Library building, which was a beautiful historic building that was sadly torn down years ago. Folks like our historic preservation board don’t want to see that pattern continue.”

It’s a solid piece, Simpson believes, one that could still become something grand again, as it once was. Then it could carry forward a rare thread in the tapestry that is the city’s pioneer history.

“These old buildings are really important to who we are and who we’ve decided we want to be economically,” he said. “So, our stance is, let’s keep the pumphouse. Let’s restore it. Let’s invest in it and use it, because it’s something that could make a lot more money for us in the future than it will cost to tear down.”

Only time will tell if this building that was once the pride of Cheyenne can return to its former state.

Time, that is swiftly running out.

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