Miracles Save a Remarkable Woman's Photo Collection

Nancy Anderson, a local historian, was the special guest at the May 7 Tuesday Talks where she made a presentation on the life and times of Lora Webb Nichols.

Anderson, a close friend of the Nichols family, is the author of “Lora Webb Nichols: Homesteader’s Daughter, Miner’s Bride.” She is also a close friend of the Nichols family. In her presentation, Anderson talked about how Nichols was a contributor to preserving Encampment’s history.

According to the Nichols’ Archive website, (https://www.lorawebbnichols.org/), she collected approximately 24,000 negatives and captured important images of what the town of Encampment once looked like. These images help people understand history throughout the entire Platte Valley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Anderson explained how Nichols’ personal belongings helped open the doors to the Platte Valley’s history. miracles that Nichols’ collection was preserved and put on the world stage.

“Last week I encountered Laura twice in some strange location,” Anderson said. “There was a new program on PBS called ‘Idols of America.’ This man is exploring various issues of American culture. This was about the Cowboys so, of course, I had to look at it. I watched a little segment about homesteading. A couple of pictures of homesteaders flash by and right in the middle was a picture taken by Lora of her sister near the Encampment River that lasted for three seconds on my television.”

After Anderson watched this special segment on PBS, she received an email from a group of archivists who offered an online digital workshop for people with degrees in digitalization. Anderson would discover in her email a photo of a person responsible for keeping Nichols’ history alive.

”A couple of days later, I was looking through my emails and I received an email from this prestigious group of archivists, who collected historic pictures,” Anderson said. “It was an advertisement for a digital workshop you can attend online. It went out to the archivists in Universities, museums, and other major institutions. It was Illustrated with two images. One was a school in Greeley, Colorado. The second photo was of Vera Oldman sitting on the steps of the Peryam house in Encampment.”

Oldman is Nichols’s daughter-in-law and was one of the founders of the Grand Encampment Museum in the early 1960s. It’s where Nichols’ historic archives are preserved. Oldman knew how important Nichols’ photos were so she wanted to build a museum to preserve them and Encampment’s mining town history.

“The archivists who sent me the advertisement in my email would be horrified if they knew the process by which Lora’s collection was saved by a bunch of old cowboys,” Anderson said. “From the time the photos were discovered until today, there have been so many miracles in saving these important historical treasures.”

Anderson said Nichols’ historic photo collection was saved through digitalization with the help of a Chicago Public School District educator named Gino Tucker. Anderson said she credits Tucker for how historic photos are saved.

“Tucker set the standards in scanning and saving historic photos,” Anderson said. “He used the computer system up in Chicago right at the rise of computer technology. When Tucker made his plans to retire from the school system, he asked his union where he could live and where he and his wife could live off his retirement. His union recommended Encampment, Wyoming. Talk about a miracle. It was amazing.”

Anderson said when Tucker moved to Encampment he was able to teach people how to save photos through digitalization, including Nichols’ son.

“He would help design our system and train us in scanning,” Anderson said. “Lora’s son, Ezra Nichols, fortunately, had lots of luck. He was able to buy our system and pay for Gino’s services and permitted us to do this project. We could always call Gino whenever we had questions or needed help.”

Anderson said DVDs were developed and they were scanned of 1200 which was practically unknown at that time. She said you can find Nichols’s prints on a gallery or website. She also mentioned the original prints which have been used on the internet have never been rescanned.

“We had to go through the process of saving the negatives, “ Anderson said. “They are currently in freezers at the American Heritage Center. The original scans that were used 25 years ago are reusable.”

You can find additional information on Nichols’s legacy and her photos by visiting the Wyo History website.