Sherman, Wyoming
Sherman is a ghost town in Albany County, Wyoming, United States. Sherman is southeast of Laramie in the Laramie Mountains and is named for Civil War and Indian Wars general William Tecumseh Sherman, purportedly at his request. From the 1860s to 1918, the town sat at the summit of the original grade of the first transcontinental railroad along the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad, 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 than the trails that 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 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, two section houses, and a windmill 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, 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 south. Residents soon abandoned Sherman, leaving behind a small cemetery that is still present today.