Laramie Plains Civic Center

Wyoming · USA · Cemetery

The Wyoming school was long said to stand on a graveyard. The truth is stranger: vigilantes killed a gang here, and the bodies were moved before building.

The oldest part of the Laramie Plains Civic Center in Wyoming dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, and the reports inside it are domestic in scale. Radios switched on. Items scattered across the old classrooms. Telephones ringing. Windows found open. A music teacher is said to have taken his own life in the newer north section.

The explanation offered for years was that the original building stood on a graveyard. A correction posted in January 2007 replaced it with something closer to the truth and considerably grimmer. In the late 1800s a gang had taken control of Laramie, and the response was a series of vigilante killings. Some of the bodies ended up buried in the vicinity of what is now the Civic Center, scattered rather than laid out in any plot.

The townspeople made a point of reburying them elsewhere before the school went up. So the building does not sit on a cemetery. It sits on ground where a town once dealt with its own dead in a hurry, which is a different story and a better documented one.

FAQ

Hvor ligger Laramie Plains Civic Center?

Laramie Plains Civic Center ligger i Wyoming, USA.

Image: Tony Webster / CC BY-SA 2.0 via wikimedia