The connections a small corner of the world can make are like ripples on a still pond disturbed by a small stone tossed into the middle. The concentric circles that flow outward to the shore are akin to human experience. One intriguing man’s interests changed his small corner of the world.
John Robert Pitts raised sheep a few miles north of Riverton, on land he purchased from Mary Madden in two separate sections, the first in 1939 and the main sections in 1943.
Nancy Herbst, one of four daughters born to John and Betty Jane, with sisters Betty Lou, Peggy, and Donna, recalled growing up there.
“When my dad first came to Wyoming in 1923, he came out and started working for Mrs. Madden, a widow,” Nancy said. “The Madden Sheep Company. He purchased it from her after helping on the ranch. She retained part of it.”
John R. Pitts Wyoming Jade catalogue – h/t Nancy Herbst
John Pitts was an enterprising man of greatly varied interests. He collected coins, stamps, jade, agates, and while raising sheep, had a business selling Wyoming jade.
“My dad was an avid rock collector; he had a business, sold agates to people all over the world. He had a jade mine in Jeffrey City,” Nancy said. “A company sued him for taking jade off their property for $800,000. He was innocent and ended up selling jade to the company for $10,000. We had five buildings full of rocks. He sawed the agates and jade, made jewelry, and sent some off to Japan for carving.”
Pitts was familiar with the wilderness that was 1930s, 40s, and 50s Wyoming, and found rocks and semi-precious stones as he grazed sheep in partnerships east of Shoshoni and in the Gas Hills.
He also knew a bargain when he found one. It was sweat equity in action for John Pitts in constructing Pitts Cabins in 1948 and 49.
He found an initial deal on inexpensive lumber at the Heart Mountain Japanese Internment Camp near Powell.
Eventually, 14,000 innocent Japanese Americans were forced into the Heart Mountain Camp. Concentration camps across the West held approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans hostage from 1942 to 1945.
At Heart Mountain, a camp was hastily laid out on a barren, windswept plain below the mountain. Prisoners were flowing in by the hundreds each day, and there were few buildings in place to house them. Barracks were quickly constructed. These units were 20×120 feet.
An Army of contractors quickly built almost 500 of these barracks. They were unfit for occupation, but summer was ending, and the prisoners, many of them women and children, needed some place to protect them from the impending Wyoming winter.
When the camp was deserted, the farm land surrounding it was opened for homesteading, with preferences given for returning veterans.
Other homesteaders had to win farms by a lottery.
Many veterans and prospective homesteaders lived in the abandoned barracks.
The farm land was quickly taken. The new homesteaders were able to move buildings and barracks onto their property, but many buildings remained.
The government began selling the barracks for a dollar each. A 2400 square foot building for a dollar, it was an amazing price. Still, they didn’t move them all. The government lowered the price to two buildings for a dollar, and the camp buildings disappeared.
Part of the agreement when a homesteader signed with the government was that improvements had to be made to the property within five years. In moving a Heart Mountain structure onto their new homestead, they met that requirement.
Heart Mountain Camp was taken piece by piece to farms and towns throughout the Big Horn Basin. The news of this cheap lumber reached Fremont County as well.
Dozens of farms and ranches around Fremont County have buildings originally built at Heart Mountain, many more buildings in Riverton, Hudson, Shoshoni, Lander, Pavillion, and Dubois are made of wood disassembled at the Heart Mountain Camp and trucked down the Big Horn Basin along the narrow original Highway 20 through the Wind River Canyon.
Riverton had a reclamation project in 1906 on land ceded from the Wind River Reservation in the McLaughlin Agreement of 1905.
In the 1950s, another reclamation at North Portal, commonly known as the Third Division, brought hundreds of construction workers to dig canals, pour cement, construct head gates and laterals, and build bridges across the new main canals.
These men needed somewhere to live.
John Robert Pitts had an idea, combining the boom of the Third Division Project with the cheap lumber available at Heart Mountain.
On April 20, 1939, he purchased land from Mary S. Madden in an agreement that granted Mary a one-half interest in a portion of the property. That property is immortalized in a mural on Main Street in nearby Riverton.
By the late 1940s, there were just a few buildings remaining to be demolished and repurposed at Heart Mountain.
Pitts bought a couple of the Heart Mountain barracks, demolished them into usable lumber, and hauled them down the Wind River Canyon. He stacked it on trucks and hauled them to Riverton.
Sometime in 1948 or 1949, he began constructing a small housing development about three miles north of the Riverton city limits that he called Pitts Cabins.
The original Pitts Cabins was a development of small cabins, with the Pitts’ family living in a house north of the business.
“The Bureau of Reclamation building in Riverton burned,” Nancy said. “Dad hauled them out there for bigger duplexes. We lived in the old original house. He brought in the duplexes, and we moved to another one, because it was bigger.”
Nancy has fond memories of life at Pitts Cabins.
“When I was a little girl, it was a beautiful place,” Nancy said. “My dad planted plum trees all around the cabins, and crab apple trees. In the spring when it all bloomed it was beautiful.”
Years later, someone tried to pull out the lilacs but they came back.
Kids being kids was all in a day’s fun for children in the 1950s and 60s.
“Mom and dad went somewhere and we all got roller skates and roller skated from the back bedroom to the kitchen to the living room. Mom was so angry we scared up the floors,” Nancy said. “We had a porch on the house, then they closed it in,” Nancy said. “I slept on the porch that was my bedroom.”
Nancy’s grandfather, Edward O’Melia, immigrated from Ireland and settled in Youngstown, Ohio, but he moved to Shell City, Missouri.
“Mom was born there. Dad ventured out to Wyoming, came back, and met Mom,” Nancy said.
Pitts was ahead of his time in marketing and selling jade, agates, and artifacts.
“He traded with a colonel in the Army, bought out old jade, supposedly from a tomb,” Nancy said. “He probably would have been an eBay-type person today. He was in the lapidary journal.”
John’s youngest brother Bill, (he came from a family of 12 siblings) is pictured with John in the Riverton Post Office Mural, “Lambing Time,” painted by George Vander Sluis and displayed in 1942.
He remained a sheepman despite all his other pursuits. Leasing land in the Gas Hills with the Gavis Sheep Company.
His friends called him Johnny Pitts.
“My dad bought me a pony from Bob and Rita Campbell,” Nancy said. “She was kind of a naughty pony. She broke away and ran to Morfeld’s. Dad took me down there and we rode her back.”
Ever on the lookout for unique rock and mineral formations, grazing sheep on the Wyoming desert was a perfect way for John to locate interesting items.
“Dad went between Moneta and Shoshoni and picked up sand pillars,” Nancy said. “He mounted them in concrete. The pillars were on both sides of the driveway. He gathered a bunch of those and decorated the yard.”
It soon filled up with reclamation workers.
Pitts had other long-term guests who would be a stable market for decades to come. In 1931, the Honor Farm, a minimum-security prison, was built across the road on 880 acres of good farm land. The wives and families of inmates soon began living at Pitts Cabins.
In an ironic twist, buildings constructed for innocent people, victims of systemic racism by their own government, were now the home to the families of men who broke the law and were sentenced for their crimes.
Over the years, Pitts Cabins were marketed as an economic temporary housing and later as low-cost housing.
John was a strong, robust man, but he contracted leukemia.
“It was probably chemically induced from ag chemicals,” Nancy said. “They took his spleen out, that was a treatment back then.”
It was no use. John Robert Pitts passed in 1967 at just 61.
“I wish people could have seen it way back, because it was a beautiful place. I made a lot of friends with the kids there,” Nancy said. “He planted all those cottonwoods, some are 70 to 80 years old, and rows of lilacs, as a little girl, they were beautiful.”
A couple of years later, his business became known as Cottonwood Courts in deference to the now majestic cottonwood trees he planted among the cabins.
Stories of life at Cottonwood Courts abound.
Anna Brinker shared one on a Facebook page dedicated to the memory of the little camp.
“Back in 1995 we lived in Riverton Wyoming, in a little housing development called Cottonwood Courts. It was a bunch of little black and white, tiny houses/duplexes lined up in a few rows. Right outside our place there was this big Cottonwood tree that I liked to climb that had a fork in it, a little way up. One day I climbed a little higher than I had before and got stuck in that fork, with my knee bent under me, obviously I freaked out and started crying for my Daddy. I remember that scared feeling like it was yesterday. Lots of the other dads out there came to try and rescue me, but I only wanted my Daddy. Sure enough, he rescued me from that tall Cottonwood tree, just like I knew he would. He was always there for me. Always there to catch me.”
Ione Lewis lived in Lusk, Wyoming, where she worked multiple jobs as a single mom while her children graduated from Niobrara County High School. With her children graduated she went back to college and earned a master’s degree in business management from Colorado State University.
In 1969, she married a rancher from Perez, Colorado, Francis Hruza. That same year she and Francis purchased the 30-unit Pitts Cabins and renamed it Cottonwood Courts.
Many of the residents not related to the inmates at the Honor Farm were Native Americans from the Arapaho or Shoshone tribes.
Alvina May Aragon was one of them, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. Alvina lived at Cottonwood Courts on two occasions, the first from 1971 to 1973 and the second for a year from 1983 to 1984.
“I remember Saturday mornings when Francis Hruza would drive through the development in his white pickup, collecting kids and taking them to the park for a swim and an ice cream cone,” Alvina said. “Ione Hruza, in those years, taught business courses at Central Wyoming College in Riverton, helping the kids with math problems. Me and my cousins were always going to her house for dinner. She would help us with our homework, and if we got an A or a B on our report card, she would give us 50 cents, a lot of money at that time.”
One of Ione’s sons, Lon Lewis, became a veterinarian and is the inventor of “Greenies” hexagon-shaped dog treats that clean canine teeth.
Cottonwood Court is where a lot of families lived while their fathers were incarcerated at the Honor Farm. At least in the late 70s and early 80s.
“My dad always called it the Bug Nest,” retired teacher Rosanne Riley said.
Several buildings in Riverton were made of materials from the Heart Mountain Barracks.
“Roosevelt Street and the area behind what was once Mr. Ds have several. I lived in one that was a teacherage at the Crowheart School. All 800 square feet of it,” Roseanne said.
As the years passed, Cottonwood Courts began to crumble, both physically and in terms of its tenants.
It became a haven for criminals and drug activity.
A scandal in the late 1970s at the Honor Farm exposed a prostitution ring operating out of Cottonwood Courts, with their main clients the prisoners from the Honor Farm.
When an inventory of a shipment of Thanksgiving turkeys didn’t match the invoice, Honor Farm officials investigated and found inmates trading turkeys for sex with women at Cottonwood Courts.
By the turn of the 21st century, Cottonwood Courts had seen better days and was on its last leg. An inspection discovered asbestos in the roofing and in some insulation, and the camp was condemned.
“The white siding that dad put on the outside was all asbestos,” Nancy said.
It is now being demolished to prepare the location for Copper Mountain Irrigation, a Thermopolis company that is expanding to Riverton.
From a Japanese Internment Camp to a sheep farm, to a thriving little business, to ruin in a short 75 years; that’s the story of Pitt’s Cabins and Cottonwood Courts.
Cabins, families, and memories. Proof that even the smallest corner of the world can feel the echoes of history.