It’s a place you might miss while heading west toward Dubois at 70 miles an hour. A single green road sign reading Burris Elevation 6165 feet marks the site of a once thriving little community. The town of Burris is intertwined with the Alexander family.
There is a legend that the tiny hamlet of Burris in western Fremont County was named after a lynched outlaw. The name Burris was once attributed to the outlaw “Dutch Charley” Burris who along with the infamous, Big Nose George Parret robbed a Union Pacific freight and murdered a pair of law enforcement officers. Burris was pulled off a train bound for Cheyenne at Rawlins after he was arrested in Rock Springs and hanged by angry family members of one of the men he killed.
But that’s just a legend. The Burris name came from Mrs. Allen Morris who briefly operated the post office before E.E. and Emily “Bunny” Alexander took it over. Mrs. Morris named it Burris in honor of her first husband.
Mrs. Morris opened the post office in July of 1922, but it lasted only one year, closing in 1923.
In August 1924, Emily Clara Alexander reopened the post office. She served as postmistress until she passed in 1931, when her husband E.E. took over. E.E. was postmaster until January 1946, when his daughter-in-law, “Bunny took over.
The Alexander family delivered the mail and sold gasoline, groceries and ice for the next half-century.
Joe Alexander still lives near the store. He was born in Riverton in 1936 but was raised at Burris.
“My dad and granddad built it,” Joe said.
Joe’s family history is tied to the Dry Creek area and on into Dubois. Martin Olson, the famous superintendent of the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company was Joe’s great uncle by marriage.
The Burris store building remains in a little draw about eight miles west of Crowheart on U.S. Highway 26/287 but it wasn’t always there.
“The store was first built on Little Dry Creek about a half mile away on the old highway,” Joe said. “It was moved here in 1939 and four cabins with it.”
The original Burris Store was built on Highway 87 West, part of the old Yellowstone Highway. The route went through Burris and the nearby town of Lenore that had a hotel, store, restaurant, and bar. But things were changing across Wyoming, and in Fremont County particularly.
A new, easier-to-travel highway was laid out in the 1930s in conjunction with the building of the Midvale, Riverton, and LeClair Irrigation District. Diversion Dam on the Wind River prompted the moving of the highway closer for maintenance and the new route established Crowheart, and Burris but abandoned Lenore.
The Crowheart and Burris stores moved to the new highway. Lenore was just too far away and the town withered and died.
“Scott Peterson, my dad, and granddad moved the original store with two model A trucks. They pulled it up the hill, I imagined some horses had to help,” Joe said. “It was west of where it is right now, just passed the bridge 200 yards. If you look to the left there’s a house that was where the old Burris store. Johhny and Ida LeClair built a house right where the store sat. Johnny and Iva bought it from grandpa in 1939.”
Moving a heavy log building in 1939 was a much more arduous process than moving one today with steel I-beams, hydraulic jacks and high-powered heavy equipment. The Alexanders used heavy, Douglas fir logs on a fulcrum to lift the building. They dug trenches under the structure, chained the building in place, then lifted the other end of the building before putting those logs on wheels and slowing pulling the entire contraption up a 75-foot-high hill, and then back down into the Burris draw where the building now stands.
E.E. didn’t move the post office, instead he gave the building to Billy and Mary Engavo. Five Engavo children grew up in the little house.
Joe’s grandmother was the postmistress in the 1920s.
“When she passed in 1931, my grandad took it over as postmaster,” Joe said. “His name was Esley Eugene, but he went by E.E. Alexander.”
The original post office building still stands on the property where the old store was moved from.
“There is a picture of my grandmother standing in the doorway, Emily Clara “Bunny” Alexander,” Joe said. “She was originally from Germany. She came to Casper, met my granddad and they herded sheep around Moneta for years.”
Near the end of World War II, Joe’s father, also named Joe, added an addition to the northwest side of the store.
“All the logs came from Sheridan Creek above Dubois,” Joe said. “I was just a kid, 10 to 12, I helped them get them.”
The larger logs on the original store were cut a couple of miles away on Dry Creek.
“They skidded the logs up to the store with a team,” Joe said.
The senior Joe was an enterprising man, always up for new ideas to make the store successful.
“He made it into a little hamburger joint, then a bar. Dad sold beer. Mom sold a lot of hamburgers” Joe said. “But he got tired of the drunks and closed it.”
Joe’s father, Joe Alexander was born at the Dutch Joe Ranger Station on South Pass in 1912. His mom, Dorothy “Bunny” was born in Dubois in 1913.
“She was a Hinton, one of the first families in Dubois,” Joe said. “Granddad Hinton is buried at the old Lenore cemetery, near the Lenore Store, which the Peck’s were instrumental in.”
In 1931, E.E. Alexander set aside an acre for a cemetery, which still sits at the old store site. Joe’s grandmother, Emily Clara was the first person buried in the cemetery.
“Lyle and I put a pole fence around it,” Joe said. “There are 11 ex-military people buried up there.”
Joe has three children, Debbie, Lyle and Joe.
The store featured electric lights a cooler used to keep the ice from melting in hotter months powered by a Kohler Light Plant. The light house also served double duty as a coal shed. It was a small log shed east of the store with a generator that ran on white gas.
The Conoco pumps at the Burris Store sold red and white gas.
Though coal was closer at Hudson, E.E. and his son Joe preferred the harder coal from Gebo.
“They’d run a 1941 Ford one-ton truck up to Gebo twice a year,” Joe said. “They’d fill it as full as they could and burn wood if they ran short.”
“Our family is scattered close around here,” Joe said. “I graduated from Dubois in 1954. My brother and sister graduated from there as well, and two of my grandchildren.”
Joe’s mom, Bunny, retired from serving as postmistress in January 1976, and job she did for 30 years. The store closed 11 years earlier.
When the store closed, a new post office was built 25 feet to the west of the store. This was the location when the Burris post office closed for good.
Upon closing in 1976, Bunny served 30 local post customers, and many more on the Star Route from Burris to Dubois.
In a 1975 interview with Carolyn Tyler of the Riverton Ranger, Bunny reflected on her tenure as postmistress.
“Most of the changes have come in the past two or three years,” Bunny said. “Until then, postal regulations were fairly stable and things ran pretty smoothly. The past couple of years, however, have seen a constant change in postal regulations and in my opinion, have led to uncertainty in operations.”
Bunny said the changes weren’t the reason for her retirement. She had two hip replacements in the last two years.
“Thirty years is enough,” she said.
While Burris was a thriving store and filling station, it was also a place for hunters and fishermen trying their luck in the Wind River Mountains to stay.
“We had four cabins for hunters and fishermen,” Joe said. “There was an outfitting business, Gannet Peak Outfitters, here in the late 50s and 60s. The old Burris place was the headquarters and they’d get their stuff together. We’d load them up in pickups and trucks to Cold Springs, then take horses or walk into Gannet Peak.”
Most tourists, hunters and anglers don’t realize that it is much closer to Gannet Peak from Burris than it is on the other side of South Pass up the Big Sandy. It’s a much more challenging route, but once you clear the ridge above Burris, you can spot Gannet Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming in the near distance to the south.
“Cold Springs used to run the best water you could ever drink, but now it just puddles up,” Joe said.
The store was a mainstay of the area, along with the store at Lenore and Crowheart. Though the stores were only about eight miles apart, distance was a challenge to farmers and ranchers when the only transportation was a buckboard and horses and the roads were little more than muddy, rutted two-track affairs across the hills and prairie.
“We sold just about anything in the way of groceries,” Joe said. “Before they had refrigeration they had an ice box.”
The ice came off Dinwoody Lake a distance of nine miles today, but shorter on more direct routes before the highway was built.
“In wintertime we’d go to Dinwoody Lake and cut 24×24 inch blocks and load them on trucks” Joe said. “We kept them in the icehouse. The ice box had eight doors. Ice would last long enough to make it to the next season.”
They packed the ice in sawdust, then added another layer of ice, then sawdust around all four sides, then they put sawdust on top of that and added more ice to fill the icehouse. Finishing the top layer with a final layer of sawdust. In the High Country, sawdust wasn’t hard to come by with mills and tie camps dotting the area around Dubois.
“My dad started cutting it, by scribing on the ice. Then we cut it with a saw. It looked like a crosscut wood saw. We’d pop it out, then put a pair of tongs on the piece of ice, pick it up and put it on the truck,” Joe said.
Once it was delivered to Burris and stored in the icehouse they’d use it in the store or sell the ice to customers.
“We’d get a block of ice in a wheelbarrow, then break it up and put it into the ice box,” Joe said.
The store sold canned goods, bread, cigarettes, potatoes, meat and produced.
“Granddad would go to Riverton and get produce,” Joe said.
They were a Conoco franchise.
“Conoco delivered from Riverton,” Joe said. “Fred Stratton owned the bulk plant. There is a plaque on wall from granddad in 1928 for selling Conoco products.”
E.E ran the store, and Bunny ran the post office.
Supplies came from the Welty Store in Dubois who had regular deliveries from Idaho Falls or from Fuzz and Marilyn Foster at Gardner’s Market.
Bunny did a little more than a traditional postmistress, she was a midwife, delivering babies at women’s homes or on occasion at the store.
“I can’t tell you how many babies my grandmother delivered because they couldn’t make it to Lander or Riverton,” Bunny’s granddaughter Marla Alexander said.
E.E. had a contract with the Wyoming Highway Department to grade the old road east to Crowheart and west toward Dubois.
“He ran a horse grader working so many miles towards Riverton and Dubois,” Joe said.
The new highway, U.S. 26/789 changed the route from Riverton to Dubois. The old Yellowstone Highway was covered by the new road in many locations, but it veered off from Lenore, by many miles, too many for the store to be moved as the Burris and Crowheart Stores were to continue in business.
“The Old Yellowstone Highway made a loop towards the river then came back up,” Joe said.
At the same time, the Burris and Crowheart Schools were combined. With the Burris School moved and attached to the one at Crowheart.
The Burris post office closed January 2, 1976, and the store did as well, but remnants of the store, and of Bunny remain around Fremont County and beyond.
“My grandmother and Fremont Miller used to see who could grow the biggest hollyhocks,” Marla said. “Seeds from the original hollyhocks are planted all over Fremont County and now in Southern Arizona.”
Joe lives across the highway from the store and his nephew Will Alexander now owns the property that was once the Burris Store.