The Place:
Lovell was founded by Mormon colonists who came into the region in 1900, and was named for a big-scale rancher who had preceded the Mormon settlers. Lovell is known as the Rose City, primarily through the dedication and commitment of Dr. William Watts Horsley, an authority on roses, who came to Lovell in the 1920s. The climate and growing conditions were ideal for growing his prized roses. Soon the town became populated with home rose gardens, then community rose gardens were established. During the summer tourists from all across America come to Lovell to enjoy the beauty of the rose gardens throughout the town.
Lovell's historic Hyart Theater and the EJZ Bridge over the Shoshone River, built in 1925, are both on the National Register of Historic places. Also in town is Mural Park with a outstanding mural:
Wild Horses of Big Horn Canyon, by artist Harry Engstrom, and assisted by 12 year old Rachel A. Erest, completed in 1999.
The Person:
Lovell was named after a local cattle rancher, Henry Clay Lovell, who established a herd of over 25,000 head in the early 1880s.
Henry Lovell was a widower. Sometime in the early 1880s he married Bertha Clara Collins, a schoolteacher from Missouri. Because the headquarters ranch at that time was little more than a cow camp, Lovell built a handsome frame house in Billings, 95 miles to the north, where Bertha would stay. In July of 1885 while back in Missouri she gave birth to their only child, a son Willard. Less then three years later Bertha, whose health had been failing ever since giving birth, died in California. Henry Lovell would never remarry.
The
M L Ranch, named for Anthony
Mason, the financier, and Henry
Lovell, the rancher, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 15, 1992.
By the time Henry Lovell came to the Bighorn Basin in 1879, he had lived a life filled with adventure. At the age of 14 he left home and headed for the southwest where he led government mail trains on runs from Fort Dodge, Kansas to Mexico City. During this time he acquired three bullet wounds and a knife wound fighting off hostile Indians and outlaws.
Not long thereafter he went into the cattle business where he met Kansas City capitalist Anthony Mason. They soon formed a partnership in the ranching business where Lovell provided the expertise and Mason the financial backing.
In 1879 and 1880 Lovell trailed his first three herds north. Leaving southern Kansas his operation brought the cattle into the basin, just west of the Bighorn River, further south from where you now stand. In 1882 Lovell’s outfit brought in 12,000 cattle from Oregon. As the herd grew in size Lovell decided to relocate his home ranch in 1884 further north on the property where you now stand, east of the Bighorn River, on Willow Creek. The move was influenced by the land’s proximity to the nearest cattle shipping point on the Northern Pacific Railroad, 95 miles north at Billings, Montana.
From the National Park Service
Mormon Colonizers in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin
From 1847 to 1900, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) founded hundreds of settlements throughout Utah and the Intermountain West. One of the last places they settled was in the Bighorn Basin of northern Wyoming, where they established the towns of Byron and Cowley in the fall of 1900. They also moved into the existing settlement of Lovell, where they quickly outnumbered the original non-Mormon settlers and redefined Lovell as a Mormon town.
The northern basin was already home to a small group of Mormons who had settled in Burlington, Wyo., beginning in 1893. Their success brought the area to the attention of LDS Church leaders, and this, along with encouragement from Wyoming government leaders, led to an official church-sponsored colonization project known as the Big Horn Basin Colonization Company. It was organized on April 9, 1900, for the purpose of building an irrigation canal north of the Shoshone River and establishing agriculture and communities in the Bighorn Basin. The company was led by LDS Church Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff along with Byron Sessions, Jesse W. Crosby and Charles A. Welch, all of whom were prominent men in Utah. Sessions, Crosby and Welch would go on to become the top ecclesiastical leaders of all Mormons in the Bighorn Basin."
From Wyoming: Wyoming History Org
