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3 Guys from Albany visit Albany Wyoming -- May 4, 2009

We headed out to Albany #12, arrived there on May 4 -- Albany, Wyoming, our highest Albany yet, & perhaps the smallest. Southern Wyoming is desolate, windy & traffic-free. Albany is west of Laramie, up the Snowy Range mountains, almost at the end of the line. But there was a sign & the "Albany Lodge," & we read our poems there under the sign. Poet Jared Smith was our driver (& our host in his home in Lafayette, Colorado, with his wife Deborah & Heather, his daughter).

Our reading started with a recording of Tom Nattell reciting "Noreen Kaleeba", Dan did "Where Were the Professors" to introduce one Albany to another, then Charlie with "Growing up in Colorado..." & we ended with the ur-Albany poem "O Central Avenue," the 3-voice 3 Guys poem, with Jared ably sight-reading Tom's parts. It was a glorious moment in the muddy sunshine for another Albany on the all-Albany tour.

Back in the Albany Lodge we looked at historic pictures on the wall of mountain men floating railroad ties down the the creek & at old pictures of the Lodge in early years, as the Pine Bar. Our bartender, Lacy Langford, was related to most of the 14 others in the town & filled us in on the history as she knows it -- settled in 1886 as a railroad town, but she didn't know why it was named "Albany" (few folks know why their town is named what it is).

We checked this out the next day at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie (the county seat) & a helpful staff person named Stephen led us to a couple sources. The most useful was Wyoming Place Names by Mae Urbanek, Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1988 which indicated that the town of Albany was established in 1900 and named by railroad officials for the county. Albany County was created in 1868 by the Dakota legislature (which Wyoming was then a part of) from the larger Laramie County. Charles D. Bradley, a member of the Dakota legislature from Wyoming, worked for the new county, and named it for the capital city of New York, his native state.

Of particular note was that in 1910 Albany County elected Mary G. Bellamy as the first woman to serve in a state legislature. She went to Washington, D.C. in 1917 to represent Wyoming women in the national suffrage drive. The account claims she was the first woman Justice of the Peace in the world. It should also be noted that Wyoming was the first state in the union to have a woman governor.