Wheatland prairie ranch country
— — the country that doesn't end at the fence line.
Not only on a wall.
“Wheatland sits where the short-grass prairie runs out toward Laramie Peak. The seat of Platte County, a railroad and irrigation town the Wyoming Development Company laid out in the 1890s to water the flats from the Laramie River. Cattle ground, hay ground, the long quiet kind of ranch country where the wind decides what the grass does. Laramie Peak holds the western horizon at a little over ten thousand feet and the sky takes up the rest. A piece of Wyoming that doesn't try to impress and doesn't need to.
Wheatland prairie ranch country, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wheatland is the seat of Platte County in southeast Wyoming, on Interstate 25 about seventy miles north of Cheyenne and seventy miles south of Casper. It sits near 4,738 feet on a high plain between the North Platte River to the east and the Laramie Range to the west. The town grew up in the 1890s around the Wyoming Development Company, an irrigation venture that diverted the Laramie River through canals to make hay and grain ground out of dry flats. The population in the 2020 census was 3,535.
Laramie Peak rises to 10,272 feet on the western skyline, the last big bump of the Laramie Range before the plains take over. It was a landmark on the Oregon Trail; emigrants kept watch for it for days before they reached Fort Laramie thirty miles to the east. The light on it changes the look of the whole valley by the hour. Wheatland Reservoir No. 2, the storage pool for the irrigation district, lies twenty-some miles west toward the peak and holds the morning quiet.
Ranch country here works on a calendar of hay cuttings and weaning weights. First cutting of irrigated alfalfa typically comes off in late June, second in August. Cattle come down off summer pasture in October. Winters are cold and windy more than they are deep, and chinook winds off the Laramies will strip a south slope bare overnight. Spring greens the rangeland in May. Pronghorn fawns are on the ground by Memorial Day, and the meadowlarks start before light.