Pam Thayer has spent more than 20 years trying to protect and revitalize downtown Rawlins.
That makes what she is preparing to do to one of Front Street’s oldest survivors — the Wyoming Bar — especially painful.
“It breaks my heart to tear it down, but sometimes you have to do what's best for the community,” said Thayer, executive director of the Rawlins Downtown Development Authority.
Local historical research traces the first floor to about 1890, when it operated as a hotel. A second story was added around 1900 as the building took on another life: A saloon downstairs, with rented club rooms upstairs that also functioned as a brothel.
Now, after surviving more than a century of Rawlins history, the old Wyoming Bar is nearing its end.
The City of Rawlins is soliciting bids to demolish the vacant building, officially describing it as a “blighted” and “structurally unsound” historic commercial structure.
“The bottom line is, as a preservationist and someone who loves our downtown history, we tried for years to assist and help people find funding or information to keep it,” she told Cowboy State Daily, "but sometimes you have to do what is best for the safety of the community."
‘It Was Cool Inside’
Thayer remembers the first time she walked inside the Wyoming Bar. It was February 2006.
“It was cool inside,” she said.
Her husband grew up in Rawlins, and his parents had a bar just a couple blocks away.
The building still had the character of the old drinking establishment that occupied Front Street through generations of Rawlins history.
By about 2016, however, things had changed dramatically.
The roof needed repairs, Thayer said, and those repairs weren't made. Snow and rain began working their way into the structure.
Water damage accumulated. The roof deteriorated.
The building was declared a dangerous structure in 2016.
And then it sat.
For a decade, the Wyoming Bar stood beside one of downtown Rawlins' busiest public spaces as its condition continued to get “substantially worse,” Thayer said.
She said there was evidence of squatters or possibly kids entering it, although nothing serious was documented. The city has kept it boarded up since 2016.
Its faded aqua facade shows the years of neglect, with paint peeling from a side door and weathered “DO NOT ENTER” signs duct-taped across the front doors.
The roof is sinking. Ceiling tiles are hanging loose. Water has penetrated so much of the structure that Thayer doubts much of its interior material can even be salvaged.
When contractors gathered Tuesday for a mandatory pre-bid inspection, she said they made it only about 10 feet inside the front entrance.
It was too unsafe to go farther.
'Big Elephant'
The property has had six stakeholders since 2011.
As the building deteriorated, Thayer said taxes were not being paid. Eventually, a trust connected with the property contacted the DDA and offered to donate it.
Even then, the DDA did not quickly jump at the chance to take ownership of an old landmark.
For years, Thayer said the organization tried to help people involved with the property find money, resources or information that might make preservation possible, but the deterioration continued.
By 2025, the equation changed.
In 2025, Rawlins secured nearly $494,000 in federal grant funding toward the demolition. The entire project is expected to cost about $600,000.
With demolition money available and the deteriorating building offered as a donation, the DDA agreed to accept it.
For Thayer, it was an acknowledgment that decades of history could no longer outweigh the public-safety problem the building had become.
“It's sad when we lose our last private building,” she said.
At the same time, she added, it had become a “big elephant” in downtown Rawlins, and she is excited to see it go.
When Front Street Was Young
The building's decline stands in sharp contrast to the Front Street of the era in which it was born.
The Carbon County Museum said the building stood in the oldest commercial part of Rawlins.
National Register of Historic Places documentation shows the city's oldest commercial buildings were clustered along West Front Street, immediately north of the Union Pacific tracks.
Most of those early structures were eventually removed or substantially renovated as downtown grew northward — but the Wyoming Bar survived.
The museum paints a rowdier picture of the street during its early years.
At one point, 16 bars reportedly were located just between Third and Sixth streets on Front Street.
After beginning as a hotel, its 1900 remodel brought a saloon to the ground floor. Upstairs were rented club rooms that also served as a brothel.
A June 23, 1900, newspaper advertisement billed Robert Freedman's establishment as “The Wyoming,” a “Club House and Saloon” offering sleeping rooms, wines, liquors and cigars.
By 1993, a weathered “WYOMING BAR” sign hung above the entrance.
Advertisements from around the turn of the century promoted furnished rooms and modern amenities in the young railroad town: Steam heat, electric lights and baths.
In 1950, the owner was murdered in a storage room in the rear of the building.
A Piece That Got Away
The bar's historic Brunswick backbar was removed years ago and taken to Laramie.
Cowboy State Daily reported in 2024 that Gary and Mary Hopkins, longtime owners of the Cowboy Saloon & Dance Hall in Laramie, acquired the backbar from the Wyoming Bar after the Rawlins building had been condemned.
Mary Hopkins said her husband bought it sometime before the COVID-19 pandemic and installed it at the Cowboy Saloon, where it became part of that establishment's own collection of historic Wyoming bar fixtures.
"It’s a beautiful mahogany piece that comes with so much history," she said.
Old signs, doors, hardware, windows, trim and anything still bearing the Wyoming Bar name could carry pieces of the building's history elsewhere.
Even the stone could get another life.
The city's demolition requirements call for contractors to come up with a plan to preserve as much of the exterior stone as possible, but Thayer said the interior water damage has become so bad she doubts there is much left that can safely be salvaged.
‘Take That Sucker Down’
If there was any doubt about whether contractors would be interested in the unusual demolition job, Tuesday erased it.
Eleven contractors attended the 2 p.m. mandatory pre-bid meeting, Thayer said. They came from Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and South Dakota.
“It's exciting because of the broad range of interest," she said, noting that rural communities sometimes receive only one or two bids for specialized projects.
Bids are due at 2 p.m. Nov. 10, according to the city's invitation to bid. They will be publicly opened at Rawlins City Hall.
Thayer said a tentative contract award is expected to go before the Rawlins City Council on Nov. 17.
After years of trying to find a way to preserve the structure, she is ready for the hazard to be gone.
“Take that sucker down,” she said.
Contact Kolby Fedore at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
