Driving From Laramie To Sinclair On Wyoming's Forgotten Lincoln Highway

Kathy Jordan, a volunteer with Fort Fred Steele State Historic Site, advised our Lincoln Highway tour group to take our time and watch our step, as we headed down a steep strip of rock-studded dirt that was once part of the historic cross-country road in the early 1920s.

The rocks are smooth, rounded, and sit well above ground. Stepping on them bends our feet in two directions at once. The sizes of the rocks were odd, ranging from duck eggs to baseballs.

They seemed an interesting choice for the nation’s first coast-to-coast automobile highway, a 3,000-plus-mile route that began in New York and ended in California. 

But the rocks would have been an upgrade for the times. Prior to the Lincoln Highway’s construction in 1913, most of the nation’s roads were plain dirt: bumpy, dusty and all but impassable in any kind of wet weather.

Carl Fisher, who conceived of the highway, first called his project the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway. It was going to cost $10 million to build, even with communities along the route providing equipment in return. 

He changed the name to the Lincoln Highway to build support for his vision.

“The Lincoln Highway had so many different routes, and this is only one of them,” Jordan said as we walked along the tiny stretch of highway turned trail. “And it was only in existence in Fort Steele from about the 1920s to 1939. Then they moved it … for I-80, and that killed the town of Fort Steele.”

People still unwittingly take this old section of the Lincoln Highway in the winter Jordan said. When I-80 is closed and people start searching for an alternate route, this old stretch of Lincoln Highway is where GPS sends them. 

Then Jordan or another volunteer gets a call when people inevitably become stuck.

We get to go past the gate that is normally locked on our tour because this is an Alliance for Historic Wyoming “Unbarred” tour. 

The whole idea is to take people past gates and doors that are often off-limits and present slices of rare history with local experts like Jordan.

Our rocky, dirt road quickly gave way to a grassy stretch in a wooded area that Jordan said is maintained because she gets a lot of calls from tourists asking to see this stretch of the old Lincoln Highway. The trail abruptly ends, though, right between two pylons that used to be part of a Lincoln Highway bridge. 

Downed trees lay between the pylons along with some brush, and beyond that a head-high sea of meadow stretching into a distance that felt like forever. 

The winter travelers who take Google’s suggested alternate route don’t typically make it this far without getting stuck, Jordan said.

Even on a snowmobile, travelers can't make it through this area. 

There’s still the river hidden by the meadow to cross, and there’s no longer any bridge on this once upon a time stretch of highway.

Putting Together The Lincoln Highway Pieces

The many pieces and segments of the Lincoln Highway are what Alliance for Historic Wyoming Executive Director Megan Stanfill found most challenging about developing an unbarred Lincoln Highway tour in Wyoming.

This tour from Laramie to Sinclair covered about 116 miles of Wyoming and U.S. transportation history.

Stanfill is a Virginia transplant whose hobbies include driving race cars with her husband on weekends and chasing history across Wyoming. She has a bachelor’s degree in history. Her love of the past runs deep.

“When I first moved here, I saw the statue of Lincoln, and I was like, ‘What is that doing here?’” Stanfill recalled. 

The 42.5-foot-high memorial statue of America’s 16^th president towers above I-80 at the interstate’s highest point on what’s known as Sherman Hill just east of Laramie, and it commemorates the Lincoln Highway.

Soon after she became director of the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, Stanfill learned the nonprofit is also the state chapter for the Lincoln Highway Association.

“I was, like, that’s why there’s a statue!” Stanfill recalled, chuckling a little at the memory. “And I was like, ‘We’ve got to do stuff with this. This is amazing!’”

Stanfill already gets a lot of calls from people who want to drive the Lincoln Highway, so she sees a lot of potential for a bona fide Wyoming tour.

One of the first things she has to explain to those who want to drive the route in its entirety is that it’s not actually possible to do that anymore.

“There were so many different routes over time,” she said, holding up an app showing where the Lincoln Highway is in relation to one’s present location. 

Different-colored lines correspond to different iterations of the route. The thickness of those lines indicates whether that portion of the highway is still accessible. 

In many cases, it’s not. 

“You can drive through the area where the Lincoln Highway was,” she said. “And there are lots of places where, if you know what you are looking for, you can see where the highway used to be.”

While on our way to Bosler, one of the many dwindling little towns that lie along the Lincoln Highway’s old route, Stanfll pointed at a two-track that was clearly on private property. 

“That’s the Lincoln Highway,” she said, holding up the app to show how it correlated with the dirt road. 

In other areas, the highway isn’t even a two-track anymore. 

It’s a raised, grassy ledge running across a field of reclaimed earth that’s now part of a cattle pasture.

Bosler’s Tourist Camps

In Bosler, we stopped for what was in decades past known as a tourist court. 

These motor lodge precursors popped up all along America’s fledgling highway system in the 1930s as more and more people had automobiles and started to explore the country on their own.

Stanfill is particularly excited about this particular piece of Wyoming history, even though it came along somewhat after the heyday of the Lincoln Highway, when the U.S. Numbered Highway System replaced named trails, and Lincoln Highway became Highway 30.

Today, the abandoned buildings feel abstract. Dark wood juts up into the sky, devoid of all trace of white paint that older photos show once covered it.

No trespassing signs have been tacked up on the building. Plywood covers windows and other openings, along with scavenged doorways in a vain attempt to keep people and animals out.

They haven’t stopped a small army of scrawny stray cats, who have taken over and made the tourist camp their home.

Bosler’s tourist court is one of the many historic structures along the old Lincoln Highway route that Stanfill believes is in danger of being lost. Keeping tabs on vulnerable history is one of the Alliance’s primary missions. 

Bosler was platted in 1909 near the railroad, mostly on the west side of the tracks. In 1924, it relocated east of the tracks to get closer to Highway 30, which was its lifeblood at the time.

Bosler had big dreams when it began as a railroad town. 

Irrigation ditches were planned for “fine cabbage farming,” according to newspapers and promotional materials of the day. 

Bosler’s fortunes rose with the Lincoln Highway when it was built in 1913, and fell with the construction of I-80 beginning in the 1950s, which completely bypassed the small town.

In the 1940 Census, Bosler had a population of 264. Today, it is a disappearing dot on the map of about 10 people, according to an Alliance for Historic Wyoming.

The Fossil Cabin And Medicine Bow

From Bosler, the Lincoln Highway tour made a brief stop at the original site of Wyoming’s Fossil Cabin, built at the base of the famous Como Bluffs about 5 miles east of Medicine Bow.

Thomas Boylan, who homesteaded the location in 1908, had originally intended to display a complete dinosaur skeleton at the site, but 6,000 bones and numerous years later realized he was never going to be able to do that. 

There was no way to sort out what bones he had, and a scientist who examined them told him he didn’t have all the pieces he needed for a complete skeleton.

So, Boylan built a cabin from the bones instead in 1932. It weighs an astounding 102,166 pounds, according to Wyohistory.org.

Como Bluff is where the first large dinosaur skeleton in America was discovered, and it still retains a legendary status in paleontological circles, though it is on private property.  

Longtime plans to move the cabin to Medicine Bow to protect it from vandalism are still in place. 

​There, it will sit beside the Medicine Bow Museum, as well as the site of an old grocery store where locals say Owen Wister tried to catch a nap, but instead caught snippets of conversation about the Johnson County War. 

That is part of what inspired him to write America’s first Western, “The Virginian.”

In his novel, Wister cast Medicine Bow asthe supreme example of a Wild West town, full of cowboys and shootouts, schoolmarms and saloons, ranchers and outlaws.

August Grimm and George Plummer built a hotel in 1911 — long after Wister first came to town in 1885 — and they named it after Wister’s novel to honor a thread of history that had elevated Medicine Bow at the time and made it a favored destination. 

Medicine Bow’s future seemed bright at the time the hotel was built, and a grand, three-story structure with Renaissance Revival architecture seemed justified.

The town was then the largest cattle shipping point on the Union Pacific Railroad, sending 2,000 head of cattle to market per day in addition to shipping many other goods. 

Prospectors searching for gold frequented the town as well, using it as a place to resupply their operations, as did scientists searching for fossils.

But Medicine Bow’s fortunes ultimately followed the fate of the Lincoln Highway just as Bosler’s did, declining when Interstate 80 was built.

Welcome To Parco, The Wonder Town

Among the newest towns along the old Lincoln Highway Route is the tiny town of Sinclair, built in 1922 by Producers and Refiners Corp. in 1922, when it was seeking an ideal home for a refinery.

The town’s name at that time was Parco, an abbreviation of the company’s name, which changed in 1943 to Sinclair after Sinclair Oil bought the refinery. 

Parco began its life as a company town, but not a typical one. 

Oil magnate Frank Kistler wanted his workers to feel a sense of pride and community, so he hired Fisher and Fisher, a prominent architecture firm in Denver, to design a “wonder town.”

Fisher and Fisher used a Spanish mission motif for all of the town’s buildings, organizing them around a central plaza and fountain. The homes were laid out in an orderly grid pattern that they felt would be conducive to the future expansion a boom town was bound to need.

Most of Parco’s original buildings remain, and some of them still say “Parco" on them. But the town never really expanded, and Kistler was forced to sell his holdings in 1934 after crude oil reached an all-time low price of 10 cents per barrel. 

Sinclair, which bought the refinery, would play a huge role in fueling America’s aviation dominance in World War II, and today is still one of the most significant and technologically advanced refineries in the Rocky Mountain region.

The town eventually transitioned from a company town to an independent town, selling the homes to residents in the 1960s. 

Its fortunes also have suffered in the wake of Interstate 80, residents say, with motorists bypassing the small town for larger stops along the way. Businesses have shut down. The town lost its school about a decade ago, as well as its library. 

One bright spot for the future has been the preservation of the Parco Theatre, which closed in the early 1970s. 

The theater reopened in late 2024 to celebrate Sinclair’s 100-year anniversary with a completely restored stucco exterior and an updated seating capacity of 200. 

It’s become something of a community center, with a calendar full of activities for the community that range from movies and plays to concerts and comedies. 

Hanna, The Town That Coal Built

One of the biggest towns left along the old Lincoln Highway route is Hanna, population 660, founded in 1889 by the Union Pacific Coal Co. 

The name of the town honors an Ohio politician and businessman named Mark Hanna, who was also a member of Union Pacific’s board of directors.

The coal fields in nearby Carbon, now a ghost town, were faltering. Hanna came to visit a potential new coal field in 1888, and became a staunch advocate of building a new town near them. The town was named after him as a result.

Hanna has a big dream that they’d like to make happen along the Lincoln Highway. That is the restoration of an old gas station that was once along the route. 

“We have all the ingredients of an original Lincoln Highway station in storage,” historian Nancy Anderson, who lives in Encampment but also works with projects in Hanna, told the tour group. 

That includes an intact gold crown, which was characteristic of all the Standard Oil stations at the time.

The station was at the Coyote Spring service station, Anderson said, showing a photo of a ramshackle wooden building.

“This crown is really pretty classy, isn’t it, for such a rather primitive kind of building,” she said. “A family lived at Coyote, no electricity — and it’s hard for us to imagine — raising a family of five.”

The station included a little meeting room where an Atwater Kent radio drew coal miners in so they could hear what was going on in the world at the time, like Joe Lewis fights.

“It was very much a center of the community,” Anderson said. “And this was about 1935.”

Paperwork from the station from the World War II era show that the station had an inventory of 2,000 cigarettes, and that the family also raised milk cows to make a living.

“They sent the cream to Denver to be made into butter, and they dug wells,” Anderson said. “They had sheep, and it was a very poor kind of living. 

"But when you talk to the family, it was a glorious growing up out here in the middle of nowhere.”

Future Tourism Awaits

Anderson is among those who hope the Lincoln Highway Association will start to focus on developing experiences along the route, pointing to the marketing success of Route 66, which has been promoting road trip sites to historic locations along the 1926 route for decades.

To Anderson, the Lincoln Highway’s significance exceeds that of Route 66 because it was America’s first coast-to-coast highway. 

It’s also the highway that inspired President Dwight Eisenhower to push for a national network of highways after taking a trip on the highway in 1919 to determine if the nation’s roads could handle motorized army vehicles.

“This was called the Mother Road,” Anderson said. “And it has recently been rediscovered for its value as far as history and its value as a tourist attraction.”

Gas station restorations along U.S. 66 have been popular, Anderson said, such as the Hackberry General Store in Arizona, which Anderson said has been preserved in all its “rusticity.”

“I think what a wonderful idea for the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming,” she said. “To be interested in not only a film or a picture, but to actually be able to visit a building.”

The pieces of that vision all await, a vision that just needs a little funding to become a reality, to keep the spirit of the old Lincoln Highway motoring along.

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