Big Horn Academy Historic District

The Big Horn Academy Historic District is significant under Criterion A for its primary role in the development of education in Cowley and the Big Horn Basin. The Big Horn Academy was the first High School in the Big Horn Basin and in Cowley; the Gymnasium was the first constructed in Cowley. The period of significance for this district is 1916-1942. The first building, the Big Horn Academy was constructed in 1916 and the second building, the Cowley Gymnasium, was constructed in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration Project. The Academy is now being used for a preschool and the Gymnasium is vacant. Plans are now being made to restore the Gymnasium for community use.

The Mormon people came to the Big Horn Basin in 1900 in response to a call from their church president to colonize the west. An added incentive came from William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) who had acquired state permits to appropriate water along the Shoshone River. He communicated a desire to see thrifty settlers of their type establish homes and farms on a large block of land along the river. Almost the first thing the Mormons did on arrival, after starting the construction of irrigation works, was to build churches and schools. Primitive log cabins were the first such structures.

In 1907, the Mormons started construction in Cowley of a stone schoolhouse, a part of which was allocated to the use of a more advanced academic enterprise which they would call the Big Horn Academy. Its program was essentially that of a high school, although in the context of that time it was thought of almost as a college Students came to the Academy from a wide area to live and board, somewhat as students leave home to attend college today. The Mormon church planned to rotate the Big Horn Academy every few years between the towns of Lovell, Byron, and Cowley where the program would be housed in available facilities. However, the school never made it to Byron and in 1913 the LDS authorities started planning the construction of a permanent building to house the Big Horn Academy. The old stone schoolhouse was torn down and the new school building was completed in 1916 at a cost of $40,000. The work was done entirely by horse and manpower. Stone for it was quarried from the hills to the north by the expenditure of brutally hard work, much ingenuity, and a limited amount of black powder. The beautifully dressed, coursed stonework, even the large capstone including its chiseled inscription, was all shaped, placed, and mortared by hand.

The Academy was operated as a church school until 1924 when its physical facilities and responsibilities were transferred to School District No. 28 and the entity thereafter to be known as the Cowley High School. The building could accommodate 400 students. This building has been intimately associated with nearly every aspect of Mormon history in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. Its uses and influence have extended far beyond the merely educational phase of their lives (important as that has been ) to touch importantly every other aspect of their history to date. Important public figures, distinguished musicians, All-American basketball players, beloved pioneers, and solid citizens by the hundred have trod these hallways down through the years.

A half-century ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, Congress established the Works Progress Administration to bring work and income to people all over America whose overalls were beginning to hang on them a bit loosely by then. You could hardly think of anything that a creative imagination could dream up in the way of public construction that the old WPA didn't help finance at that time. The city dads of Cowley, Wyoming, naturally, like everybody else, asked to get on the gravy train too with a project to build a "community hall"! Uncle Sam came through with a few dollars (approximately $10,000); and for a total investment of public funds that would hardly pay the interest for six months on a typical bond issue for the construction of a high school gymnasium today, these embattled farmers put up their community hall/gymnasium. Within a very few years, it became officially the Cowley High School Gymnasium, for which purpose the building has served the school and the community most admirably for fifty years.

Like the first building, however, that is but one among a myriad of uses it has been put to. It is no exaggeration to say that every usage or employment that a meeting house in a small town might conceivably have has been valiantly served by this glorified old cabin. The ghostly presence of public meetings, church conferences, annual celebrations, family ingatherings, class reunions, dances, political rallies, musical extravaganzas, dramatic presentations, and even prize fights, all long past, seems almost palpable here. If these old buildings aren't historic places then we have no history.