Old buildings make way for new

With the final building torn down on North Big Horn Avenue in Moorcroft, residents are reminiscing about the life of these old structures as they anticipate the possibilities of what may be built next, adding to Moorcroft’s history.

Lifetime citizens Raymond Petersen and Rosalie Brimmer recall their childhood on the avenue.

Brimmer remembers cold lockers kept in the rear of the grocery store that lived after the mercantile and before the building housing Diehl’s Supermarket now. “They used to let people keep food in those lockers. People didn’t have freezers at home like we do now and they could just go in and get meat or anything else they had stored in there when they needed it,” she says.

“There was roller skating in the senior center,” she continues. “The center used to be the main building in Moorcroft, having dances on Saturday night. If you wanted [to do] something, you went there.”

Petersen recollects that the old senior center had, when he was a child, housed the town’s power plant in the basement, providing electricity for all of Moorcroft. The upper floor accommodated town hall with the fire truck and later an ambulance in the garage area, too.

He says that, after the Avon closed its doors as a theater, the building housed an insurance company and a pool hall.

Petersen also mentions rumors that there was once a tunnel from the one of the buildings to another site in town, which has long been closed up and concreted over. This alleged tunnel housed and allowed transport of bootlegged booze from place to place during prohibition. “I never saw the tunnel, but they claimed there was,” he says.