Every summer, on Casper’s Parade Day, my grandma would don her widest-brimmed hat and comfiest pantyhose, and we’d set up our folding chairs on a downtown sidewalk, sitting for hours in anticipation of the first float. She seemed to know every person who walked by, ready to thoughtfully ask about their son’s new job, their last vacation or famous rhubarb dessert. I didn’t understand then what I do now. She was civic-minded to her core, well before “civic” became a bad word.
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It wasn’t until after she passed that I learned how truly dedicated she’d been to the community. I found her jewelry box bursting with pins from service clubs and her recipe shelves filled with notes from decades of preparing community meals. I was well aware of the women she’d play cards with each week, the senior center’s dance troupe, and, of course, the gals who ran the church basement like a well-oiled machine. As I grew toward the siren call of civic engagement myself, I learned she was far more than a social woman. She had a robust, impressive resume hidden beneath the quilt patterns and rosary beads. She was a workhorse in the economic and social vitality of my hometown.
As a community builder, I know this steady, generous labor is the sinew in Wyoming’s vitality. Regardless of decade or locality, people build strong towns.
Strong-willed women like her are at the core of thriving communities. They lead thoughtfully at the helm of our businesses and organizations, volunteering through service organizations and religious institutions, while often balancing most caregiving in their homes. Whatever town you find yourself in, you know of a woman like my grandma who brings focus and compassion to the table of something valuable.
When American communities welcomed new, sprawling shopping malls of the 1980s, shoppers were enticed away from historic city centers. In this moment, Mary Means created what would become a powerful national movement for preservation and economic vitality. Main Street America, the entity that guides over 1,600 communities today, was the product of her belief in the strength of community.
Now, the “mother of Main Street” is officially held up as the gold standard for that work with the Mary Means Leadership Award. This year, the prestigious national honor went to Laramie’s Trey Sherwood for excellence in similar work. With the same tenacity as my grandma, these unexpected workhorses have changed the course of preservation and development.
My grandma doesn’t have prestige tied to her history of public service. Most of the women who have nurtured our communities don’t. Even Means’ legacy requires seeking out, despite being Main Street’s architect. I’ve worked in Wyoming’s Main Street network for 15 years, and learned of Means’ story only this spring when Sherwood won her award. Means was, and still is, fiercely dedicated to safe, kind, vibrant places for all people. She’s nurtured through steady leadership and loved with a ferocity that I’ve only ever seen from a mother’s heart.
Each corner of Wyoming has been made stronger by a woman’s call to care. She’s tended spring’s gardens and bought winter boots before the first freeze. She’s fed neighbors and listened closely to the stories buried inside a town’s history. Wyoming’s mothers are patient and kind — resilient as Means’ fight to save our towns’ small businesses and cultural assets in the golden age of the shopping mall.
I don’t believe my grandma would be pleased by the Wyoming of today. Everything has become so loud, yet fewer neighbors linger on the sidewalks to check in with one another. But it wouldn’t have stopped her from showing up — at the parade, in the church kitchen, across a table of cards. What she couldn’t understand, she’d bring to her priest, not her Facebook feed, with a fiery heart.
Amid shrinking volunteerism, the abandonment of local service clubs, and burnout among our community builders, the work keeps going and growing — often on the shoulders of unpaid, unthanked, unseen mothers of our towns.
What’s next depends on our willingness to name these women’s work for what it is, to pull up a chair and join the quiet architects saving our towns.
