History comes to life: a San Diego man discovers…

If the walls of 1884 at Bohemian Metals could talk, oh, the stories they would tell.

Store owner Brian P. Snyder has some tantalizing remnants of that history. Photographs by Brother A. Underwood. Grocery stores used to call the building home, but most of its history seemed destined to remain a mystery, until one day, out of the blue, he received a message from a San Diego history buff named Mike Hennessy.

The message included a photo of A. Underwood & Bro. Grocery stores as they looked in early Cheyenne. It was a beautiful two-story red brick building that housed three businesses on one base. Hence its nickname, Trinity Block.

“I believe Bohemian Metals occupies the one-third of the original building on the far left of the photo, while the other two-thirds of the building has been remodeled and occupied by the Knights of Pythias and the comic book store,” Hennessy wrote. “Many of the architectural details appear to match much of your store, based solely on this old photo.”

In fact, it was an exact match.

But what really caught Snyder’s attention was the newspaper article Hennessy sent with the photo.

He explained how three entities came together in 1884 to replace some old adobe rubble on the site and revitalize that corner of Cheyenne. These entities were the Knights of Pythias, CP Justus and A. Underwood.

“I used to think this whole building was the Knights of Pythias,” Snyder told Cowboy State Daily. “But it was really the three entities combining resources to build three buildings on one foundation, which I guess saved money.”

Treasure in a flimsy shopping bag

Hennessy began his journey back in time, chasing his great-great-grandfather Abraham Underwood to Wyoming after his mother gave him a shopping bag full of scraps of paper and photographs. I was cleaning things out for a remodeling job.

“It was just a total treasure trove of stuff,” Hennessy told Cowboy State Daily. “There were a lot of photographs and poems that family members wrote and then photographs of Abraham Underwood.”

It was about 2,000 pages from various eras, an avalanche of history that had no real order.

Hennessy reached into the bag from time to time when he had some free time, pulling out a page here and a photo there, each a new rabbit hole to dive down.

Finally, he got to Underwood’s photographs and documents and found something more than just a rabbit hole. It was a labyrinth of history.

“I noticed there was an Underwood store in this (newspaper) photograph, so I think it obviously must have been an employee,” Hennessy said. “Because I don’t think there are too many A. Underwoods in Cheyenne.”

In the end, Hennessy found so many items over a 45-year period, from 1865 to 1910, that he was able to piece together a fascinating picture of his ancestor in Wyoming, and it’s the untold story of a self-made man in Cheyenne, the Magic City. of the Plains.

Underwood’s Tribulations

The newspapers of the time were not like today’s reports, so focused on a big, impressive image. At that time they had correspondents in the country, who wrote about the neighbors and their activities, no matter how small and trivial they were.

These correspondents wrote about Underwood’s successful fishing trips, as well as a not-so-successful one in 1871, where Underwood accidentally shot himself in the wrist. This time the bullet escaped, instead of the fish, much to Underwood’s chagrin.

There is also a paragraph about a nefarious geranium thief, who urges the individual to at least return the largest pot of geraniums or face prosecution. And there is a paragraph extolling a high-society dinner theater held at Underwood’s house in 1879, where young people put on a show called “The Duchess of Dublin” to raise funds for the ME Church.

In 1880, an article recounts the theft of a horse from JC Horton and a saddle from Underwood. There’s also a funny story from 1885 about a team of runaway horses stopped by a bunch of hapless Underwood potatoes.

“A team belonging to Frank Malone ran yesterday morning from the Haas blacksmith shop on Thomes Street, to the corner of Eddy and Seventeen streets, where he left part of the cart in front of Joseph La Rose’s meat market,” reads a statement of April 16. newspaper article.” “Then the horses ran down the sidewalk of the K. of P. block, where Underwood Bros. had a large quantity of potatoes in sacks on the road. The horses fell on them and were secured. The damage was not serious.”

The magical city of self-made men

That’s the kind of color that fascinates Hennessy and is one of the reasons he loves history.

But it’s also been fun to put Underwood’s story in the broader context of what was happening in the country at the time, and in Cheyenne in particular.

In 1867, Cheyenne was a railroad town at the end of the tracks with big aspirations. People thought it was going to be another Chicago or even the capital of the United States.

Underwood arrived Cheyenne in 1870 It was just the flip side of a failure that occurred when the tailgaters and their hangers-on left Cheyenne for Laramie, and just a year before Horace Greeley’s optimistic letter “Go West, Young Man,” urging Americans generally seek their fortune – or at least a better life – in a place where jobs are not “given as a handout.”

Underwood had already discovered this idea, and it is a story that is told in fragments here and there through the Cheyenne newspapers of the time.

Underwood’s beginnings were quite humble, according to those accounts. He started in a small grocery store with a partner, AG McGregor, but eventually rose to own one of Cheyenne’s best grocery markets.

“Cheyenne is a city of self-made men,” reads a newspaper article from the day. “Every man here who has engaged in legitimate business and attended to it strictly has now a good competence, if not a comfortable fortune. No better example of this statement can be found than the success of the Underwood brothers, the well-known grocers.”

Let’s go shopping at Underwood’s

Underwood’s store, over time, had several names. At one time, it was the “Cheap Cash Store.” But the name he finally chose was A. Underwood & Bro. Groceries. The “s” was dropped after a brother’s interest in the company waned.

The store sold a remarkable variety of products from “California, the preserving Erie, Niagara and Genesee districts of New York,” according to store advertisements Hennessy found.

There were also bags of basic products such as flour, salt and sugar.

It had a cellar that ran the entire length of the store to store syrup and apples.

And, of course, those potatoes that a horse tripped over in 1885.

Underwood had so many ads that even Hennessy was a little overwhelmed.

“There’s just a lot,” he said. “Eggs from Colorado, fruits and vegetables from California, all kinds of things. Also as firewood and goods that people can use.”

There are also articles about Underwood’s failed attempt to start a coal business in Denver, which lasted five to six months, and the second store he opened in the Black Hills during the gold rush.

mysteries to come

Underwood’s story is still unfolding, and it’s been fun for Hennessy and Snyder to fill in some of the blanks about the building that houses Bohemian Metals, one-third of what was known in the 1880s as the Trinity Block.

“It had pictures and stuff like that and his name and his first initials, but that was it,” Snyder said. “I didn’t know his name or his wife or brother’s information.”

Best of all, though, is how it illuminates the story of one of America’s first settlers, who helped build the West and the Cheyenne. One of the many unsung heroes of early America.

“I like that he’s had success after starting with nothing,” Snyder said.

Hennessy plans to continue mining old newspaper clippings about his ancestor, starting with the 1890s, in hopes of discovering more about why Underwood headed West and why he chose Cheyenne.

“It’s hard to know what Abraham (thinks), why he left Wisconsin for Wyoming,” he said. “Maybe it was the profits, I don’t know. But there is a reason and it’s probably compelling. I know there is much more to find.”

Renee Jean can be reached [email protected].