Introduction to Grace Raymond Hebard
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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. |
Historian
Grace Raymond 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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Historian
Grace Raymond 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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Historian
Grace Raymond 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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Oregon
Trail marker with the inscription Old Oregon Trail 1843-57
in Wyoming.
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