- Megan Stanfill and Leslie Jefferson both know a lot about Fossil Cabin, a colorful old roadside attraction on the Lincoln Highway near Medicine Bow.

Now there's an effort to pick up the cabin, move it into the town so that it might be better preserved and better enjoyed.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

When a man named Tom Boylan built a house made of dinosaur bones on a desolate stretch of Wyoming highway in the 1930s, he was trying to lure motorists to stop at the filling station he owned along the roadside.

The gas pumps there were removed in the 1970s and the Fossil Cabin Museum has been shuttered since 1992.

But the unique old structure still stands, an enduring oddity of Wyoming history that's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

For nearly a decade, the plan has been to relocate it to the nearby town of Medicine Bow, but Wyoming historian, Megan Stanfill and Carbon County tourism promoter, Leslie Jefferson, say moving the 50 ton cabin has been impossible so far.

We're here at a fascinating place on the old Lincoln Highway in Wyoming near the Albany County Carbon County Line.

I think a lot of people who drive by who don't take Interstate 80, use Highway 30 as an alternate ride have driven by it many times and might not have known what they're looking at.

Megan Stanfill, what are we looking at?

- The world's oldest building, also known as the Fossil Cabin.

- Your affiliation is with what entity?

- So I am the Executive director of the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, and I also serve as the state director of the Lincoln Highway Association.

- And you've made a big part of your life's work learning about the Lincoln Highway and learning about the sites on it.

- Yes.

- And this is one of those.

The other guest is Leslie Jefferson.

Leslie, who are you with in this capacity?

- I'm with Discover Carbon County, Wyoming, and I represent Carbon County's lodging tax board.

- Carbon County is trying to do something with the Fossil Cabin, which has sat here for almost a hundred years.

But if you have your way and the plan that you have in place continues, it won't be sitting here for too much longer, right?

- That's correct.

- What's the plan?

- Well, the plan is this building was gifted to the Medicine Bow Museum in 2017, 2018, as long as they could move it to a spot adjacent to their property in Medicine Bow.

We've had one contractor try early on and it kind of failed and he wasn't able to move it.

So we are blessed by the Wyoming Office of Tourism to be able to apply for destination development grants.

So we have a destination development grant and the Fossil Cabin Project is on that grant.

So we are trying to get this building moved to its new location in Medicine Bow.

- Medicine Bow.

How far away are we from that?

- About seven miles.

- Seven miles.

And there's only one way to move a building like this, and it's proving harder than we thought.

How come, Megan?

What are some of the difficulties that might not have been apparent at the beginning?

- One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the type of materials being used in the construction.

So fossils are brittle.

They're very easily crumbled.

- [Tom] And this building has a few- - Just a few.

- Handful of fossils in it, or is it more than that?

- Yeah, it has.

- What's it made of?

It has 5,796 fossils in it.

Well give or take a few that have walked off over recent years.

- [Tom] When we say fossils, primarily we're talking about?

- [Megan] Dinosaur.

- Dinosaur bones.

Dinosaur fossils.

- Yes.

The other challenge is the weight, right?

- It's a small building.

It can't weigh that much.

- It's what?

Weighs a hundred thousand pounds?

- It's pretty heavy.

- Oh, yes.

So you have the fossils as well as the mortar that comes from local construction materials.

So you have the local sand, the local stone that's been ground up, which also includes fossils itself.

- Really?

- So it very easily crumbles and moves apart, which is why you see so much trying to hold it together, keep it together for when it starts to move.

- [Tom] So it's a fascinating combination to me of a building that obviously is incredibly solid, yet incredibly fragile at the same time.

Is this what the original contractor found difficult and is continuing to be?

- It is extremely heavy.

We have a moving company.

We had some guidelines of what we needed to do.

First, we needed to frame up the house on the inside as well as the outside, kind of hold it together.

We need to do some welding with angle iron between the rebar or between the eye beams there.

There's really not a bottom two.

Like there's not a foundation that's movable on the bottom layer.

So when he picked it up, I actually learned this from Megan, is it was too heavy and he was like, I'm done.

So that's it.

Sat for a couple of years.

We did get our grants.

We've had contractors, a moving company out here.

They gave us direction on what should be done.

So the first phase was to frame it up on the inside.

Second phrase was to get the digging out around it.

Then we got a welder out to weld on some supports with the angle iron.

The mover has come out and it's just incredibly difficult.

They would like us to remove some of the rocks that are supporting the building underneath.

So we're gonna have to go out for a rebid on that.

- Wow.

And this is a project that hasn't been going on for quite 10 years, but we're getting there, right?

- Yes.

- Why is this building here?

- Behind us is Como Bluff and it has one of the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in the entire country.

And so this is the site of where the Bone Wars were during the late 1800s, and it's known for its paleontological resources.

- [Tom] Megan Stanfill's mention of the Bone Wars refers to a notorious and ruthless competition for dinosaur fossils in the 19th century that exposed tales of theft, bribery, double dealing and slander, yet also largely established modern paleontology as a bonafide scientific field.

The contest between the two primary adversaries, men named Marsh and Cope centered on frenzied attempts to collect as many dinosaur fossils as possible while preventing the other from doing the same.

Upon learning of the abundant fossil repositories in the West discovered during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad following the Civil War, both Marsh and Cope were drawn to Wyoming in the 1870s with Como Bluff, a focal point.

The rivalry which at times included armed conflict, tarnished the reputations of both men and nearly bankrupted them eventually but dinosaur science progressed dramatically because of them.

Before they entered into their bitter competition, just nine individual dinosaur species were recognized and identified scientifically.

Largely because of the Marsh versus Cope Bone Wars, however, by the end of the century, that total had grown to nearly 150.

- The house that's here is from the original homestead, and there was a gas station here for the Lincoln Highway.

And as vehicles progressed in their technology, you could go a little further on a tank of fuel and you didn't have to stop at every gas station.

- And this was in, am I right in saying this?

This was in the days before you saw gas station that said Texaco.

What you saw was Ma and Pa's little gas station.

- Yes.

- And they were doing whatever they could as automobile traffic boomed in the country to get you to stop here instead of the place down the road.

- Yeah, the place down the road had a petting zoo.

- Yeah.

- And so- - Or a giant Paul Bunyan statue or- - [Megan] Yeah, yeah.

- These were commonplace.

- Yeah, stopping here, you know, it was Ripley's Believe It or Not and you were looking for a roadside attraction, but you were so close to Medicine Bow.

So what made you stop to fill up your tank?

Fossil Cabin.

- So there was an owner of the property and he decided that he was gonna build this.

- He actually collected fossils beginning in like 1916, 1917, and wanted to actually build statues of dinosaurs using fossils, but ended up building a cabin because he didn't have enough bones from the same dinosaur to create one animal.

- And he was not a paleontologist, he was a guy with a shovel.

So he wouldn't have been equipped necessarily to excavate a big skeleton size specimen if he found it or assemble it.

- He wouldn't have known what he was looking at.

- Yeah.

- You know, but that was the adventure of coming out here and digging up the fossils was, oh wow, look at this amazing creature.

So he had this whole collection, wanted to build statues, couldn't build statues, so he built something more useful.

- I just have a feeling that you are glad that he did it this way.

- I love that it's this way.

It's architecture, you know.

It's a house, it's a building, it's a structure.

And originally it had a flat roof.

So when you look at the old gas station postcards, you can see, you know, that's what it looked like.

It was all fossils.

You didn't see a roof on it, and you could go into the structure and so you'd be surrounded by fossils.

- So you could go in it?

- Yeah.

- And it then was a museum as well.

- Yeah.

- And not just a drive by.

It was a stop-at.

You make the Lincoln Highway a big focal point of your work, know a lot about it, and have traveled the length of it.

This is one of your very, very favorite spots of all.

Why is that?

- Yeah, I think the location of it.

You know, it's fairly remote, but, you know, it's a stop and it's one of the earliest examples of roadside architecture, roadside attractions and it's still standing.

- It's still here.

- Yeah.

- A lot of things you've heard about, they aren't here anymore.

- No.

- Leslie, you have a big role, maybe the biggest role in Carbon County tourism and boy, tourism promotion in smaller Wyoming communities is a big job, a complicated job.

It's sometimes hard to know which way to turn.

What does Fossil Cabin mean to Carbon County?

- It's a huge asset.

My child was going to U-Dub and we had to come Highway 30 because he wanted to see the Fossil Cabin.

So it's a huge attraction for people that are even remotely interested in dinosaurs or all of that.

And he loved dinosaurs all of his life.

So we came out here and we looked at it and I was like, dang.

And then there was the dinosaur Disney movie that they actually copied some of Wyoming's landscape on.

And we were bringing people through here.

And it was sad because the windows started, you know, people were taking things.

So it was a huge effort, I think.

Well, it was a huge gift to Medicine Bow Museum that they actually got deeded this Fossil Cabin.

- So Medicine Bow Museum is the owner of this?

- [Leslie] Yes.

- When's the last time it had an owner that was onsite and trying to operate it as some sort of a going concern?

- 1992 was the last time it was open for people to go in and the owner lived on site and had it open.

And then 2011 was when it was finally sold over to the current owners who gifted it to the Medicine Bow Museum.

- The Medicine Bow Museum was glad to say yes to this.

- Definitely.

- For one thing, it's on the National Register of Historic Places, correct?

- Yes, it is listed on the National Register.

However, the National Park Service doesn't like when structures are moved.

That's one of the things which in Wyoming poses its own challenges.

So coming from a historic preservation perspective, I would rather see the building moved to a steward that's gonna take care of the structure and allow people to see it and interpret it for the public than to see it here just sitting and in decay.

- But not everyone feels that way?

- Not everyone feels that way.

In the preservation world, there are people who definitely structure shouldn't be moved.

You know, it loses its context.

You know, it's gonna be taken away from the house.

It's gonna be taken away from the original gas station and it's spot on the highway - And from the Bluff.

- And yeah, you won't be able to see the Bluff, but you know, this site's still gonna be here.

You're still gonna be able to pull off and read the interpretive signs that are here.

- And I'm sure at the museum that will be the case as well.

- Definitely.

- Everyone who visits it there will know when it was built by whom, where, why.

- Yes.

- Its proximity to the dinosaur dig, which is still there.

Once something's on the historic register, do we human beings have some obligation to it then or can it just be left to ruin if that's what happened?

- It's a big misconception.

You know, people think, oh, it's on the national register, I have all of these restrictions now.

That's not the case.

You know, you can get listed on the National Register and in Wyoming, the next day you could tear the building down that.

- Is that so?

- There are no protections.

It doesn't save it from anything, but it's a record.

It's a record of the history.

It's a record of what the structure looks like, where it is and it's important.

So in some aspects, it does give you a little bit of, well, yes, it's on the National Register.

You know, it gets that designation, but it doesn't protect it.

- It's a recognition, but it's not a protectorate.

You have been on the show Wyoming Chronicle before in a short segment, but part of a larger show on the big Lincoln Monument bust that's over on Interstate 80 between Laramie and Cheyenne.

That was moved.

- Yes.

- That was a big part of our show that was on, I think, last year, but that was before it was on the National register.

In fact, what we were talking to you about was trying to get that place so that didn't have that extra layer of complication.

Do you have to apply for permission from someone to do it or once you're the owner of it, it's yours?

- I think, yep.

Medicine Bow owns it.

- That's not a headache you have.

- No.

- Your headache is?

- No, our part is actually coming alongside Medicine Bow, the museum there.

They actually coordinated.

They found the contractors.

We're kind of stepping in now because the previous director has retired.

So unfortunately she was moving on and it was sad.

We haven't gotten it moved yet, but hopefully we'll be able to invite her back once we get it moved.

- What do we know about how it actually was built?

That the landowner we've been talking about, he got the trial out and placed the fossils in it himself.

- It's described as random placement and I mean, you can walk up to it and you can see certain bones and features that you can recognize.

You can recognize teeth and tusks and it's amazing.

- He did it nice.

I mean, I'm sure we'd agree.

I don't know how to build a Fossil Cabin.

To me, I'd say he did a good job.

- Yeah, there isn't really a guidebook for building a cabin outta fossils.

- It isn't just a concrete building that he stuck some bones on and the rest of it's river rock.

The fossils themselves are part of the, what would we say, the structural integrity of the building and almost all of it is bones.

There are a few rocks.

I think it's been understood that there are but more than 5,000 bones.

I guess if we could start counting 'em here, you could get an idea, but it's authentic.

- It is.

- You say Fossil Cabin, that's what we've got here.

- It's what's here and I guess all of the fossils are laid on top of each other using the mortar from the area, which does include fossil bones.

So it's all one kind of piece and it's representative of the location that it's in.

I mean, it's so amazing.

I love it.

- What is the significance of Medicine Bow in this area along, and both of you feel free to contribute to this, along the Lincoln Highway?

I know the original Transcontinental Railroad Line is still very near here.

We saw trains just an hour ago.

What does this area mean to Wyoming?

- Medicine-Bow was the center of the East West Air Mail Trail when Air Mail started.

There's just- - I hear the sound.

This area still gets, as they say, they fly the heck outta this part of Wyoming still.

- Yes.

- I figured that out a long time ago.

- Yeah, so we're just, you know, we were on the way out west, so we are a big part of how people migrated from the east to the west in the 1800s.

We're still along the cargo line, whether it's train or on I-80 with the trucks and the semis that are carrying goods back and forth.

- Medicine Bow famously, and it's in period 50, 60 years ago was one of the Wyoming towns that was bypassed by Interstate 80.

And that's a subject for another Wyoming Chronicle show as to how they decided to put the interstate where they did and the regret that they have, I think in having placed it where it was just in terms of weather, how often does this road get closed in the winter?

Do we know?

Not very often.

- Not as often as I-80.

- Well, not even close.

- No.

- That's why people drive it so much.

Lincoln Highway did use Medicine Bow.

What do we know about why it was here and why it didn't get the interstate treatment?

I think I know some of this, but I want to hear you say it.

- There's a few different stories of why they chose Medicine Bow but really the infrastructure was already here.

In the early iterations of the Lincoln Highway, there was an option to take the Elk Mountain route but the official Lincoln Highway came through Medicine Bow.

I mean there was already a hotel here with the Virginian.

There was access to water here.

There were already gas stations popping up for travelers along the route.

So it made the most sense.

And this entire southern corridor of the state of Wyoming is just so important to transcontinental transportation.

My organization merged with another organization called Tracks Across Wyoming in 2017.

And they were a preservation group that focused on this region doing indigenous trails and Transcontinental Railroad, Pioneer Trails, Air Mail, Lincoln Highway.

- Military installations.

- Yes.

And so this whole corridor here just played a huge role and Medicine Bow was the center of it.

- The town once had a thousand people.

I know they had played high school football for Medicine Bow and these decisions where to locate the interstate highways all around the nation were, gosh, they're just so important to the communities.

But this is one of the things that helps keep this segment of the highway interesting and viable and worth seeing, worth remembering.

- Definitely.

Anything to get people off I-80 and exploring outdoors and just what we have in history coming through Bosler, Rock River, Medicine Bow, Hanna.

It's just a place that you need to experience.

- And I think in terms of tourism, this is your specialty, Leslie, more people are interested in that kind of tourism these days, I think.

- Yes.

- Than they might have been a generation ago where their destination is, and nothing against it destination is Disneyland or something like that.

And you can have a great day when you haven't gone a hundred miles if you know the places to look and this is one of those.

- This is one of those definitely.

- Part of your message in your job, I presume?

- It is, it is.

Medicine Bow is a gem in Carbon County.

Not only do we have the Virginian Hotel that was modeled after Owen Wister's book, The Virginian, but we have Owen Wister's Cabin right across the street at the Medicine Bow Museum.

So we just have kind of a treasure trove of things.

- And the museum itself has a, or is in a repurposed structure as well, right?

- It is.

It's the old UP Depot or the train depot.

- [Tom] So you could ride the train to Medicine Bow once upon a time.

- Yes.

- You can get off here, get on here.

- Yes.

- So it makes sense, that's probably the good place for it these days, isn't it?

- It is.

It's where it'll have a home with people to take care of it, you know?

And that's what buildings need.

You know, when buildings stop having people and then deterioration starts to creep in.

And so when you have people going through, when you have people taking care of, doing maintenance, you're keeping the building alive.

You're keeping its history alive.

You're keeping its story alive.

- If something goes wrong, someone's in position to notice but the time to do it is while it still can be done.

My expectation is a lot more people would probably see it than would if they just were speeding by here.

You go into Medicine Bow or make the decision to go into a museum, that's a conscious act.

I wanna see what's here rather than, what was that?

We're here on a beautiful day in October, but there are a lot of days even in October, which aren't so beautiful here.

This is a really, really rough climate for an old building to be sitting out in the great outdoors.

- Yeah, and it's been sitting here for almost a hundred years.

- Almost a hundred years.

Yeah.

- The fossils have been here a hundred million years longer.

- You're working through some millions of years in there.

One of the big things you have to do in historic preservation in museums and even in tourism, patience.

- Definitely.

- If you don't have it, you won't succeed.

A year from now, will it still be here do you think or?

- I hope not.

- Could be next spring.

- I hope next spring we'll be able to move it.

- Once it's there, the idea would be to open it up again, people could go in it or is that true?

- Well, it's framed up into different rooms now as per the museum wanted it to be.

I'm not sure of all of the different plans that the museum has for the inside.

Part of our plans before this latest setback was to make sure there was an ADA ramp going up into it.

We might have to look at different fending options for that.

However, inside there is a bone that's been dug up in Como Bluffs or adjacent to Como Bluffs that's been donated to the museum so they will have at least one artifact.

to go in, yeah.

- So whatever happens, the idea is you won't just have to stay outside- - Correct.

- And look at it like, unfortunately, we have to do here today.

This is an area of Wyoming that's really interesting, significant, fun and people ought to take advantage of it.

I thank you for lending, combining your expertise to tell our viewers more about the Fossil Cabin and tourism in this visitation and sight and sounds in this part of Wyoming.

Leslie Jefferson of Discover Carbon County, Megan Stanfill of the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, thanks for your time and your travel today and thanks for being with us on Wyoming Chronicle.