Boom and bust is a way of life in Wyoming. It’s been that way since the days of the Rendezvous, the transcontinental railroad, and the uranium boom from the 1950s to the late 70s. No place in Wyoming has ridden the crests and fallen in the troughs of the cycle harder than Jeffrey City.
A town that once boasted a thriving economy, dozens of businesses, and a population of over 4,000, it now has a couple of establishments and an estimated 38 people living there.
This is the story of one of those businesses that rode the boom and left the town after perhaps trying to hang on too long.
The Jeffrey City Mercantile was a pillar of the community. Owned by Cliff and Elaine Bloomenrader it was the preeminent grocery store for the booming town.
“My dad worked for Jim Chapman. Jim owned a furniture store in Rawlins and was a good friend of Bob Adams,” the Bloomenrader’s daughter Phyllis Hime said. “Jim told him about this new Jeffrey City uranium mine. I was four years old when we moved to Jeffrey City in 1957. My dad was in a partnership with Jim for a number of years.”
Phyllis and her older brother Neal moved with their mom and dad to the wide open, sagebrush flats, formerly known as Home on the Range as one of the biggest mining booms in the history of the west hit Fremont County.
Nuclear energy was all the rage in the post-war period. There was a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, nuclear power plants in construction, and a new “nuclear” navy was being assembled. All these innovations required uranium.
Prospectors combed the west looking for uranium deposits, with Geiger counters and shovels in hand.
In 1954, Bob Adams discovered uranium deposits near the area and in the adjacent Gas Hills.
Adams created the Lost Creek Oil and Uranium Company. He purchased land west of Home on the Range and started to build a company town.
He named it Jeffrey City in honor of Dr. C.W. Jeffrey, a Rawlins physician who was a major financial backer. He renamed his company Western Nuclear.
The new town sprang up like mushrooms after an early summer rainstorm.
Soon there were over a thousand uranium workers. The town reached 4,000 residents and the sleepy little school district created by local ranchers in the 1920s for their children swelled to over 600 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
“We had some of the finest teachers ever. The education we got was excellent. They stayed in trailers at the school district with the district paying rent to keep them there,” Phyllis said. “All of the community events took place there, like a lot of small towns. When I started first grade there were 60 kids in my class.”
All these people arriving in Jeffrey City needed groceries. Rawlins, Lander, and Riverton were the nearest towns, all about 60 miles away, so a full-service grocery store made economic sense.
Cliff and Elaine saw the opportunity and began to build their store, the Jeffrey City Mercantile.
“My Dad and his partner built it, they added on to it over the years,” Phyllis said. “There was a liquor store and then a donut store.”
The town grew rapidly. Initially, many of the residents used their first paychecks to put money down on trailer houses, but permanent homes soon followed.
If you drive around Jeffrey City today you can see the evidence of those first stick-built, and modular homes arriving in the town in the hundreds of empty footings and basements dotting the grass-covered asphalt streets.
Most of the homes were lifted, placed on trucks, and taken elsewhere as new developments began across Wyoming and the region.
The Jeffrey City Mercantile offered a full line of groceries, meat, produce, milk, and an even wider variety of home repairs, home electronics, and even automobile supplies.
“We had fresh meat, produce, and quite a big section in the store for maintenance of trailer homes,” Phyliss said. “Heat wrap, plumbing, and electrical parts.”
The Bloomenraders joined Associated Grocers, a regional supplier that brought cases of groceries on a semi-truck once or twice a week.
“Dad sold the Sure Fine brand, he would get cases and cases of groceries,” Phyllis said. “My brother and I would stock the shelves. He couldn’t compete with Safeway and Mr. D’s in Riverton and Lander price wise, it just wasn’t possible.”
Cliff and Elaine ran the store by themselves for many years, with just Phyllis and Neal helping after school and on weekends, but business began to increase with more workers coming to town.
“For a long time, it was just my Mom and Dad working at the store, “Phyllis said. “During the peak, they had 12 to 15 people working for them.”
Cliff prided himself on carrying a wide variety of items, things not usually found in a grocery store, but items the young families in Jeffrey City might need.
“A lot of salesmen came to the store to sell their products. My dad tried to get a little bit of everything that people would want or need,” Phyllis said.
One way Cliff and Elaine helped was with long store hours. They opened each day at 7 a.m. and closed officially at 6:30 p.m.
Cliff often opened the store if someone needed something in an emergency after hours.
“Milk, meat, eggs, and cheese came from Rawlins. My dad’s contacts were from those Rawlins customers. Groceries came from Casper and Rapid City,” Phyllis said. “Meat was from John Morrell. They would deliver from Rawlins to Riverton. Dad bought sides of beef and cut it. I would help him cut pork and beef.”
As Phyllis grew up, her father had plans for her future at the store.
“Dad at one point said when he was talking about how successful the store was that he wanted me to go to college and take over the store,” Phyllis said. “But I didn’t want to live in Jeffrey City.”
Aside from uranium, the area is laden with jade and agate beds.
“One week there were some people treated like royalty that came from China. They wanted to look at the agate and jade beds,” Phyllis said. “I could make change at the age of five, and these people from China were shocked that I was working.”
A similar boom was occurring a few dozen miles away in the Gas Hills and many of those miners, as well as local ranchers and oil and gas workers, came to the store for groceries.
“We sold Bunny Bread. I remember going to Denver every year to the market where Dad would buy a lot of things for the store that would appeal to the population,” Phyllis said. “We’d spend two or three days there.”
One of the high-demand items in such a young community, filled with single, hardworking miners was alcohol.
“We opened a drive-through liquor store. One of the reasons my dad brought a liquor store was for his own supply, Ancient Age bourbon was his favorite,” Phyllis said.
There was competition in Jeffrey City with the Prairie Market.
“They couldn’t make it either. They left sooner than we did,” Phyllis said. “There were other stores, but just the two grocery stores.”
The Bloomenrader grocery store lasted 33 years.
“We arrived in 1957 and left in 1990 because they didn’t have any volume to keep the doors open,” Phyllis said. “I graduated college in 1975. I worked at the store every spring break, and Christmas break until 1975. I started out in banking, then started in the hospital here in Cheyenne and was vice president of human resources, my brother moved away because he got married and was in the service.”
With the children away chasing their own dreams Cliff and Elaine ran the store for another 15 years until 1990 by themselves.
Cliff would grant credit to almost anyone who had a job.
“His accounts received got quite high,” Phyllis said. “Especially in the year, they left Jeffrey City. He hoped he could ride out the “drought.”
Jeffrey City was a focal point of the Wyoming economy. State and federal officials often stopped at the store. Senator Alan Simpson was a frequent visitor as was the governor before the crash.
“Governor Ed Herschler would stop at Mom and Dad’s store and have a bourbon and a smoke. I don’t need an ashtray girly he’d say to me,” Phyllis said. “He told my mom I made a special trip to stop here so you could make dinner. Mom was an amazing cook.”
Phyllis met her husband Chuck Hime a long time ago when she was in second grade.
“We were in the same class,” Phyllis said.
Phyllis was an excellent student but was having problems in an elementary math class.
“She had some trouble with math in school and her teacher and mom and dad couldn’t figure out why,” Chuck said. “They discovered that she was adding tax to the total like she did at the store.”
Phyllis recalled life in Jeffrey City during those hectic years.
“Jeffrey City had a lot of boom and bust cycles. There were a number of times when there were thousands of people, then Chornobyl and the price of uranium fell. Jeffrey City wasn’t long for the world.”
Near their store, a large Quonset hut still stands.
“A number of community activities took place there. They showed movies and had entertainment for the kids,” Phyllis said. “There was a swimming pool, and my brother was a lifeguard for many years. I remember my youth as a lot of swimming with my friends at the pool. It was always outdoors, located next to the Quonset building, to the right of it. In the winter grandpa would flood his yard so it would freeze, and the kids could ice skate. It was the best time of our lives.”
There were dark issues in the town as well.
“Jeffrey City did have a lot of domestic violence because of the isolation, but there were a lot of good people who had a vested interest in that mine,” Phyllis said. “They had a mill which wasn’t standard for a mine.”
The store has a new owner, living in the building as her home, but a for sale sign is out front.
“I feel like my childhood was erased. That’s why seeing the building was important to me,” Phyllis said. “She is trying to sell the building and move to Casper. I will probably never get to see it again.”