Old Main: Wyoming's University Before Wyoming Was a State

On March fourth, eighteen eighty-six, the territorial governor of Wyoming signed legislation authorizing a university and appropriating fifty thousand dollars to build it. Wyoming was not yet a state; that would not happen for four more years. But the territory wanted a university first.

Denver architect Frederick Hale designed Old Main in the Romanesque Revival style, and when its doors opened in September of eighteen eighty-seven, forty-two students and five faculty members arrived to fill it. The building held classrooms, the library, and administrative offices all under one sandstone roof, topped by an octagonal tower that was removed in nineteen sixteen. Old Main still stands at the center of the Laramie campus as the oldest building at a university that predates its own state.