AHC and Grand Encampment Museum Unite to Share Lora Webb Nichols’s Remarkable Wyoming Archive

Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962) was a prolific diarist and photographer who lived most of her life in southcentral Wyoming. She accumulated more than 24,000 negatives, representing the many shades of life in the frontier mining town of Encampment. Today, the American Heritage Center is the home to the Lora Webb Nichols Papers, a collection of transcripts, photographs, and negatives depicting Wyoming, California, and the Rocky Mountain region.

Lora Webb Nichols (then Oldman) sitting under a rock shelf with the description “There’s room here for 2, dear.” Box 4, Photo #2031, Lora Webb Nichols Papers, Collection Number 1005, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

“This collection is an endless source for interpreting Wyoming during [Nichols’s] time frame,” said Nancy F. Anderson, a close friend of the Nichols family and author of Lora Webb Nichols: Homesteader’s Daughter, Miner’s Bride. “Endless. Sixty-five years of diary, almost 24,000 images. There are diaries, letters, objects. The collection is absolutely breathtaking.”

A Penchant for Capture

Nichols was born in Boulder, Colorado, the youngest child of Horace and Sylvia Wilson Nichols. In 1884 her family moved from Boulder to a homestead in Encampment. In 1893 the Nichols family moved back to Colorado, where her father worked at the state penitentiary. In 1897, just as Lora began keeping a diary, the Nichols family returned to Encampment. She lived there until 1935 when she relocated to Stockton, California. She returned to Encampment a final time in 1956.

As a 13-year old, Nichols began recording entries in her diary, which she would continue to do over the course of her life. According to Anderson, Nichols also wrote down “innumerable poems, sayings and excerpts from longer works which were to guide her improvement.” As a youth it was clear Nichols had a penchant for capturing the domestic, social, and economic elements of everyday life.

A copper miner named Bert Oldman began courting Nichols in 1899, and she received from him her first Kodak camera; Nichols married Oldman in 1900 and they had two children. Her father also gifted her a developing kit for Christmas. At 16-years old, Nichols started taking her own photographs and developing her own negatives and prints. In 1905 Nichols built a darkroom to work as a photographer and photo finisher for hire. The first photographs Nichols took were of family, friends, and animals including her mother, her pony Nibbs, and her cat Yankee.

Lora Oldman, Maggie Nichols, and Jennie Ashley riding Nibbs, Lora’s pony, on September 23, 1901. Box 3, Photo #128, Lora Webb Nichols Papers, Collection Number 1005, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Nichols’s photography work coincided with a copper boom in the Sierra Madre Mountains. From 1897 to 1900, the town of Encampment grew to 3,000 people, many of whom sought their fortune in copper mining. Inhabitants built 13 hotels and saloons; a smelt with the capacity to process 100-tons of copper per day; and a 16-mile long tramway that carried up to 840 buckets of copper, each with up to 700 pounds of ore, from the mountain mines to the smelt.

Mining companies, prospectors, and ranchers recognized Nichols as one of the few skilled photographers in town and hired her to document their work. In addition to photographing family and friends doing daily chores like cooking, cleaning, shoveling snow, and stacking wood, Nichols started snapping shots of ore mining camps, processing facilities, infrastructure projects, and industrial landscapes.

Photography helped supplement Nichols’s income but it wasn’t her only job. After divorcing Oldman in 1910, Nichols married her cousin Guy Nichols in 1914; they had four children. A few years after the birth of her son Dick in 1921, Nichols began publishing and editing the Encampment Echo from 1925 to 1930. In addition, Nichols worked in the post office, owned and ran a local eatery called the Sugar Bowl, and cooked at the A Bar A ranch. She also operated her own photography studio, Rocky Mountain Studio, where she shot and developed her own photos and developed other peoples’ work. When the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in 1933 to run camps in Medicine Bow National Forest, Nichols documented crew members and processed film they took, some of which she reprinted and sold as postcards.

In 1935, Nichols moved to California for health reasons but kept on taking photographs. Guy Nichols remained in Encampment where he died in 1955. Nichols retired in 1956 and settled back in Encampment, which would be her home until her death in 1962.

According to Anderson, “during the last six or seven years of Lora’s life, she usually carried at least two cameras with her everywhere she went.”

Baling Wire and Capable Women

When Nichols passed, the Grand Encampment Museum recovered her diary, memoir manuscript, and negatives. Anderson, a longtime Grand Encampment Museum volunteer, helped preserve the Nichols collection in the 1990s by storing negatives in a freezer. Ezra Nichols, Nichols’s son, also lent Anderson some financial support for the project. In 2014, Anderson approached John Waggener, the university archivist and historian at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center, about long-term care of the collection. This started a process of transferring thousands of negatives and transcribed pages to the AHC. In 2015, Nichols’s negatives were officially donated to the American Heritage Center and made publicly accessible online.

Lora’s second husband, Guy Nichols (right), with Hank Beecher, mining in a tunnel at Two Toms Claim on January 22, 1911. Box 4, Photo #1213, Lora Webb Nichols Papers, Collection Number 1005, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

In 2017, the Wyoming State Historical Records Advisory Board awarded the Grand Encampment Museum an almost $2,500 grant to begin transcribing Nichols’s diaries, scrapbooks, and manuscript. The original written documents remain at the Grand Encampment Museum.

Today, the Lora Webb Nichols collection at the American Heritage Center contains transcripts of her diaries (1897-1907), her unfinished manuscript, “I Remember” (ca. 1962, covering events from 1859-1905), and thousands of images of life in Wyoming, California, and the upper North Platte River valley. It’s a collection of more than 22 boxes and 471 GB of material. Nancy Anderson and her husband Victor digitized more than 21,000 images from the collection and created descriptions for each of the images. AHC archivists then worked on transferring all of the digital images and made them accessible online.

Anderson recalled that one of Nichols’s favorite sayings was “All that holds Wyoming together is baling wire and capable women.” When it comes to local history, for Nichols and Anderson it seems to be true.

Post contributed by AHC Assistant Teacher Nick DeLuca.