The Ivinson Mansion: Laramie's Railroad Fortune

Edward and Jane Ivinson arrived in Laramie in eighteen sixty-eight, the same year the Union Pacific Railroad brought the town into existence. Edward made his fortune in banking and business on the frontier, and in eighteen ninety-two he built this Queen Anne mansion at considerable cost. The eleven-thousand-square-foot home had central heating, electric lights, and running water, luxuries that announced just how fast wealth could accumulate in a railroad town.

Ivinson donated it to the Episcopal Diocese in nineteen twenty-one, where it served as a girls' boarding school for decades. It is now the Laramie Plains Museum, the best-preserved window into the frontier prosperity that the railroad made possible.