When one considers artifacts within a city, those most often identified tend to be historic sites and architecture. These objects are the crowning achievements of a community, and represent the best of what a city has to offer. However, these artifacts rarely tell the whole history of people and their relationship to the objects and environment in the city around them.
In order to tell the whole story, artifacts of all kinds must be carefully examined. A good example of this is the"“superfund site". The City of Laramie contains one such artifact, the Baxter/Union Pacific Tie Treating Plant. This site serves as a cross-section of the attitudes and beliefs of Laramie residents and industries over the 97 years of the site's existence.
The Baxter/U.P. Tie Treatment Plant opened for business in 1886. The nation was busying itself with the business of taming a new frontier. Two main methods of “taming” an area were building rail lines for transportation, and building fences to create division in once vast expanses of open country. The Baxter/U.P. plant was critical to both of these endeavors. A variety of wood preserving products (many now known to be extremely toxic) were used on fence posts as well as railroad ties. In 1981, contamination was discovered outside of the original containment ponds created for the waste. By 1983 the plant had closed, and the contaminants left behind warranted listing the area as a superfund site. [Ref 11]
Currently, the site has been removed from the list.
It is one of the few success stories in superfund history.
The site is now being prepared to become part of Laramie's Greenbelt.
The cleanup and greenbelting of this site represent a change in
the attitudes of Laramie citizens.
It represents a new view point from citizens now concerned with
permanent environmental quality instead of extracting a profit while "just
passing through".