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Grace Raymond Hebard arrived in Laramie in 1891. The first woman to graduate with a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Iowa, Hebard worked as the only woman draftsman in Cheyenne for 8 years (while simultaneously earning a correspondence M.A. in Literature from Iowa State) before arriving at the University of Wyoming. Hebard wrote of her first sight of the four-year old campus as:
“a vacant lot…with a single, isolated building surrounded by the perpetually snowcapped mountains of the Medicine Bow Range. The campus was without fence, without walks or trees, shrubs, lawn, grass, or flowers, but the view in any way one might look was just…glorious."
She secured a position as secretary to and member of, the UW Board of Trustees. In this unique position, Hebard began forty-five years of influence on the university and the state.
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Hebard standing near a marker commemorating the 1914 marking of the Oregon Trail and the 1866 death of U.S. Army officer Caspar Collins. The marker was unveiled by the Ft. Caspar Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, July 5, 1920. |
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Hebard and South Pass City, Wyoming settler Herman G. Nickerson stand in the Oregon Trail near Split Rock, in Natrona County, Wyoming, 1915.
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Bozeman Trail map from 1911 Thesis of Vie Willits Garber. Hebard served as thesis advisor to Garber.
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Hebard earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington through correspondence and shortly after became a political science and economics professor at UW. A little more than a year later she became head of the Department of Political Science. Her doctoral dissertation, on the Americanization of immigrants, embodied a life-long commitment to welcoming immigrants to the West. When she taught a class of immigrants in 1917, the district court gave her the power to issue certificates of citizenship to students who passed her exams, thereby empowering her as an agent of federal authority.
She was a member of the committee of three who drew up the petition in 1889 asking the constitutional convention of Wyoming to adopt the woman suffrage clause. As point woman for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Hebard traveled the nation presenting Wyoming as the most progressive state of the union for women’s rights, and the birthplace of a better form of liberty that spread first through the American West. She appeared before both houses of the Wyoming legislature, bearing roses and carnations, when they ratified the suffrage amendment in January 1920. Later she served as a member of the “Suffrage Emergency Brigade,” a group that attempted to persuade Connecticut’s governor to make his state the crucial thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment.
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Hebard at the dedication of a marker at Fort Phil Kearny in what is now Johnson County, Wyoming with a crowd gathered around the marker.
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Marker with the inscription Old Oregon Trail 1843-57 in Wyoming.
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