Sheridan’s PO News & Flagstaff Cafe Is Like Having Breakfast In A Time Capsule

SHERIDAN — Breakfast at the PO News & Flagstaff Cafe can be somewhat of a Twilight Zone experience. 

You open the door and time shifts right before your eyes. You have entered a 1916 time capsule, one that has endured mostly unchanged for 110 years at Main and Loucks, an otherwise ordinary Sheridan street corner. 

“What it looks like today is what it looked like then,” co-owner Mark Demple told Cowboy State Daily. “All the glass cases are the original humidors. The cabinets up there are original, the ceiling.”

There’s even a replica of the old cigar lighter that once was at the end of the counter, along with old product tins from a bygone era. 

Then there’s the espresso machine, jolting the scene back to the present with lattes and cappuccinos.

It’s only a momentary jolt, though. History lives at the PO News & Flagstaff Cafe under the watch of Demple and his wife and co-owner Janine. 

From Tobacco To Tea And Pastries

A smoke shop might not seem like a natural pairing for a cafe. 

But the business has served several purposes over the years, including housing a post office — the source of the PO in its name. The cafe evolved as the smoke shop adapted to changing times. 

“The smoke shop has only really had a handful of owners over the years,” Demple said. “The Schriver brothers owned it for over 50 years themselves, and then it changed hands a few times. I’m one of the lucky ones to get ahold of it.”

A couple of owners before Demple, the smoke shop expanded into an adjoining space, making room for magazines and newspapers.

“Then they started a little tea and pastry shop in there,” Demple said. “Then this dining section opened up sometime in the '40s as a restaurant.”

They didn’t have enough room for a kitchen, though, so they enclosed the alleyway between the two buildings and converted it into a kitchen.

“We’ve put new flooring in there and it’s upgraded equipment,” Demple said. “But it was not a total remodel per se.”

An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse

Demple stumbled into the restaurant almost by accident.

“I actually opened up the Open Range’s restaurant at the end of 2014, 2015,” he said. “And a friend of mine was running this. I bumped into him and he said, ‘Hey, you got to buy my restaurant.’”

Demple wasn’t sure how he could take it on.

“I was putting in a boatload of hours down here opening that restaurant,” he said. “I thought, ‘Boy how could I? I don’t have any more time in the day. How am I going to own my own business?’”

But the more he thought about it, the more interested he became. The No. 1 attraction was just doing something that could be his own thing. 

“The other thing is, it’s a staple on Main Street,” he said. “The location right here is — you can’t get any better.”

The business was also about as close to turnkey as it gets. His friend had spent eight years building it, so it already had a reputation for serving delicious food. 

“We just kind of took the baton and kept it going,” Demple said. 

To his surprise, running his own business took fewer hours than he’d been putting in at the other restaurant. 

“It was perfect,” Demple said. “It worked out, and we’ve got a great staff. They do a bang-up job and we’re lucky in that regard for sure.”

Fresh, Local Flavors

The aroma of fresh-roasted coffee blends with the spicy overtones of tobacco as soon as one enters the cafe.

The coffee is a Sumatran blend roasted just for them by a local business, Manchester Coffee.

Sourcing locally is important, Demple said. He wants to support as many local businesses with his own business as possible. But he also believes the flavor is superior to other options.

“We do fresh burger,” he said. “We partnered with Legerski Meat and he asks how much meat we need and then he grinds it that day.”

The meat is never frozen, and it usually sells out each day. 

“I mean, you’re not going to get any fresher anywhere else,” Demple said. 

Sausages come from Sackett’s Market. More recently, Greybull Produce is supplying lettuce and other produce. 

“The lettuce is fabulous and they bring it to us once a week over the mountain,” Demple said.

A Beer With Family Roots

One occasional offering on the menu has a family connection that reaches back even further than the smoke shop.

The cafe sometimes sells Sheridan Beer, mainly in the summer. The golden lager has roots in the brewery Demple’s great-grandfather helped establish in 1887.

For Demple, a fourth-generation Sheridan resident, that makes the beer more than another local product.

“My great-grandfather came from Germany at age 26 with a little bit of money and the shirt on his back kind of thing,” Demple said. “And he came through Ellis Island and ended up in Kansas, and on his journey he met a couple of people who ended up coming here to Sheridan and opening a brewery with him.”

But first, Peter Demple tried his luck in dry Topeka. 

“All the bootleggers had these drugstores, and he had one himself,” Demple said. “Peter became one of the top bootleggers in Topeka back in the early 1880s. And there’s articles in Topeka papers from back there with his name in it.”

Peter was a little too successful for the comfort of authorities.

“They were always trying to shut him down and dumping the whiskey and the beer out,” Demple said. “They had arrested him three different times and brought him to court.”

The last time, they fined him $7,500, figuring that would put him out of business.

“He just basically peeled off the greenbacks and paid it,” Demple said. “And we don’t know how he heard about Sheridan, but he decided he was going to come out here and open a brewery.”

Coming to Sheridan was an undertaking because Peter had $10,000 in gold to transport. The Cheyenne-Deadwood Stage was notorious for getting robbed, so he loaded himself onto a train from Kansas to Montana. Then he hired a horse and wagon to drive the rest of the way to Sheridan himself.

“I didn’t learn this until I was an adult researching his path,” Demple said. “They never told us growing up that he was a bootlegger.”

Legal Brewery, New Set Of Troubles

Compared to Topeka, a wealthy state capital with a population of roughly 28,000, Sheridan wasn’t much. Topeka had opera houses and hospitals, a university, and professional baseball.

“If you ever see a picture of Sheridan in 1887, there’s really nothing to it,” Demple said. “Some wood buildings and a dirt street.”

That suited Peter just fine. He had plenty of cash to fund his new start, and in Sheridan, at least, alcohol was not illegal. 

Operating legally, however, came with its own set of frustrations. 

A July 21, 1888, article described the brewery’s “considerable trouble in contending with the red tape of government officials.”

The brewery had beer ready for market for five weeks, the article went on to say. All it needed were official stamps from the revenue office.

When the much-awaited large envelope finally arrived, saloonkeepers prepared to secure beer for their customers. 

The envelope was opened with much fanfare. But, lo and behold, there were the original bonds, returned because of a technical flaw in drawing them up.

“The stamps were as far off as ever,” the article writer opined. “The town is still dry.”

A Skyscraper Built On Beer

Eventually the stamps were sorted out and the Sheridan business took off, just as Peter’s operation in Topeka had.

By 1906, Sheridan had what newspapers of the day were calling a skyscraper — a four-story brewery building constructed of 300,000 homemade bricks. Plans called for producing up to 200 barrels of beer a year and buying as much as $100,000 of barley.

At 75 feet high, it was the highest building yet erected in Wyoming, according to the newspaper account. Its walls were 21 inches thick.

The brewery’s importance extended beyond the skyline. 

At one point, Sheridan Brewery was the largest employer in Wyoming. At peak production, it brewed 60,000 barrels of beer per year.

A Mr. Kelsey, who was now managing the brewery, told the newspaper Sheridan barley is “not surpassed” and has “few equals in the world for excellent beer brewing purposes.”

Kelsey credited spring water from Goose Creek with producing some of the finest beer in the West, if not the world. 

Peter also helped build a brick building that served as the county government’s early offices about the same time he established his first brewery. He later co-founded Citizen’s State Bank at the same location.

Turning The Page

Back at the cafe, Sheridan Beer memorabilia sits side by side with smoke shop history, bringing two pieces of Sheridan’s past together in one place.

Demple’s children are already helping to keep the cafe running — his son in the kitchen and his daughter running the front of the house. He hopes one or both will take over when he and Janine are ready to retire.

“Whether they both do or one of them does, we’ll find out,” he said.

The idea a fifth generation might decide to give the old business a new chapter makes him smile.

“That would make me feel good to watch it kind of just continue on,” Demple said.

History is alive in the PO News & Flagstaff Cafe. It’s hanging on the walls and filling the nooks and crannies of an ordinary shop on Main Street America. 

And it’s shining in the eyes of Demple, a fourth-generation descendant of one of the town’s earliest builders, alongside his hope that his children will carry the cafe forward yet another generation in Sheridan. 

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