A mother's work is never done. Especially for the incredible working women who juggle the demands of raising a family and paying the bills.

Here's a Mother's Day tribute to one of the hardest working moms in Wyoming history, Nellie Tayloe Ross.

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Who Was Nellie Tayloe Ross?

Historians remember Ross as the first woman to ever serve as a United States Governor. She was also the mother of four sons, George, James, Alfred, and William.

Following the death of her husband, Wyoming Governor William Ross, in 1924, she was elected to replace him in a special election.

Imagine how difficult it must have been to grieve a husband, raise four children and carry the weight of the women's suffrage movement on your shoulders.

By all accounts, she handled it with grace and dignity.

Following her term as Wyoming's first, and only, female Governor, Ross later became the first woman to ever serve as Director of the United States Mint.

She made her last trip home to Cheyenne at the age of 96. Five years later, in 1977, Ross passed away in Washington, D.C. at the age of 101. She was laid to rest alongside her late husband at the Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.

Wyoming Restaurants Featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives

It's hard not to take this a little personally. Guy Fieri of the Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives has visited the Cowboy State a few times. Yet each time he stays close to Jackson. The show takes us on a culinary voyage across the U.S, but he's never stopped in Cheyenne, Casper, or even Chugwater.

CLASSIC CHEYENNE: The Cole Shopping Center

In December of 2020, Blue Federal Credit Union completed its new headquarters at the corner of Converse and Pershing in Cheyenne. Well, it’s not so much a ‘corner’ as it is the smooth edge of a roundabout, but anyway. Before Blue FCU built its new campus, the site was at one time a premier shopping destination for Cheyenne. From the 1950s through 2016 it was Cheyenne's Cole Shopping Center.

Local businessman Frank Cole bought the land that would become a Cheyenne gathering place in the 1950s when the corner of Converse and Pershing was the edge of town. Starting in 1952, three different Safeway grocery stores called the Cole home over its half-century of existence.  A plethora of other stores served the neighborhood too. From the movie theater to Blockbuster; there was the Cole Department Store, the fabric store, the East Branch of the Carnegie Library, and so much more.

As Cheyenne grew and changed, the Shopping Center fell into decline. Stores closed and new ones didn't take their places. The anchor of the area, Safeway, closed for good in 2016 with much of the rest following. In 2018 the buildings were demolished and the new construction began. 

The Cole was so integral to the neighborhood that when we asked on social media for folks’ memories we were flooded with hundreds of responses. 

Check out many of those memories below, along with several pictures of the Cole Shopping Center, mostly from near the end in the twenty-teens.


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