Sherman is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in Albany County,

Wyoming Wyoming ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States, Western United States. It borders Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho t ...

, United States. Sherman is southeast of Laramie in the Laramie Mountains and is named for

Civil War A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

and

Indian Wars The American Indian Wars, also known as the American Frontier Wars, and the Indian Wars, was a conflict initially fought by European colonial empires, the United States, and briefly the Confederate States of America and Republic of Texas agains ...

general

William Tecumseh Sherman William Tecumseh Sherman ( ; February 8, 1820February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a General officer, general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–1865), earning recognit ...

, purportedly at his request. From the 1860s to 1918, the town sat at the summit of the original grade of the

first transcontinental railroad America's first transcontinental railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad), Overland Route") was a continuous railroad line built between 1863 and 1869 that connected the exis ...

along the rails of the

Union Pacific Railroad The Union Pacific Railroad is a Railroad classes, Class I freight-hauling railroad that operates 8,300 locomotives over routes in 23 U.S. states west of Chicago and New Orleans. Union Pacific is the second largest railroad in the United Stat ...

, at an elevation of . The Union Pacific construction crews had initially called the area Lone Tree Pass and Evans Pass. The original name honored James A. Evans, who surveyed the area searching for a shorter route through Wyoming compared to the earlier trails which crossed at South Pass. The town was abandoned after the Union Pacific moved its tracks to the south, but the townsite is still the location of the Ames Monument, erected by the railroad to mark its original high point. Today the high point of the Overland Route, as well as the high points along

Interstate 80 Interstate 80 (I-80) is an east–west transcontinental freeway that crosses the United States from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area. The highway was designated in 1956 as one of the ori ...

and U.S. Route 30, about north-northwest of the former town, are called Sherman Summit or Sherman Hill Summit.

Ghost town

The small town of Sherman arose at the site north of the tracks where trains stopped to change engines on their transcontinental journey. The stop provided a roundhouse with five stalls and a

turntable A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding phys ...

, two section houses, and a

windmill A windmill is a machine operated by the force of wind acting on vanes or sails to mill grain (gristmills), pump water, generate electricity, or drive other machinery. Windmills were used throughout the high medieval and early modern period ...

with water tank. Trains were inspected at Sherman before beginning the long descent from the Sherman Pass summit, either east towards Cheyenne or west across the high Dale Creek Bridge to the Laramie Valley. The trusses for the original wooden trestle bridge located west of Sherman were prefabricated in Chicago and shipped to the site. The bridge was the highest railroad bridge in the world at the time of its completion in 1868. Several hundred people lived in Sherman, hunkered down upon a rocky, barren landscape interrupted only by a general store, post office, schoolhouse, two hotels (Sherman House and Summit House), and two saloons. In 1885, William Murphy purchased the land that contained the monument, intending to cover the pyramid with advertising. The Union Pacific Railroad Company had other plans. The company obtained a special deed to the property in 1889. The railroad company twice moved its tracks southward toward more gradual grades over the Laramie Mountains, eroding Sherman's tenuous existence a few hundred yards west of the monument. The town's death knell came in 1918, when the railroad company closed its station house and moved the tracks about three miles (5 km) south. Residents soon abandoned Sherman, leaving behind a small cemetery that is still present today.

Nearby summits

Interstate 80

Sherman Summit or Sherman Hill Summit, elevation , is a mountain pass about north-northwest of the ghost town of Sherman at . While not a particularly rugged mountain crossing, it is the highest point of the transcontinental

. The Abraham Lincoln Memorial Monument is located there.

Lincoln Highway

Just southwest of present-day Sherman Summit at , at an elevation of about , is the highest point on the original transcontinental

Lincoln Highway The Lincoln Highway is one of the first transcontinental highways in the United States and one of the first highways designed expressly for automobiles. Conceived in 1912 by Indiana entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, and formally dedicated Octob ...

and its successor, U.S. 30. This location, where the pavement is still in place, is known simply as The Summit. The bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln once stood here; it has been moved to Sherman Summit.

Overland Route

As a result of the track move, the high point on this section of the railroad, known as the Overland Route, is now about southeast of the Ames Monument at , at an elevation of . There is no town there, but the official railroad name for this location is Sherman. However, this point (like the Ames Monument) is not actually on the crest of the Laramie Mountains, which is now surmounted via the nearby Hermosa Tunnel at the slightly lower elevation of .

References