Wheatland: The Colony That Irrigated the Plains

Wheatland, Wyoming was founded in the early eighteen nineties as a planned agricultural colony, one of the last and most ambitious irrigation projects of the homesteading era. The Wyoming Development Company dug canals from the Laramie River to bring water across the high plains to a treeless sagebrush flat, and advertised farmland to settlers in the East who had never seen a western irrigation system. The town was named for the wheat its founders expected to be grown there, and for a time the yields justified the optimism.

Wheatland became the seat of Platte County and grew into the modest service center it remains today, population about thirty-six hundred. The Laramie Peak area to the west provided the watershed; its snowpack still feeds the irrigation canals that make farming possible on what would otherwise be near-desert. The region also sits directly beneath the Cheyenne Ridge, a geological feature that influences moisture patterns across southeastern Wyoming.