Grace Raymond Hebard - Background

Background

Grace Hebard was born in the Mississippi river town of Clinton, Iowa, on July 2, 1861 to Rev. George Diah Alonzo Hebard (1831–1870) and Margaret E. Dominick Hebard (Marven). Her family soon moved to Iowa City where her father, a missionary and a later territorial legislator, built a new Presbyterian church. Hebard took her B.S. in what is now civil engineering at the University of Iowa in 1882. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi Women's Fraternity. Hebard became the first woman to "be graduated from the Civil Engineering Dep(artment) of the University," according to documents at the University of Iowa Library. In later years, Hebard reflected in a 1928 letter to a colleague on her singular experience as a female engineering student:

"I met with many discouragements and many sneers and much opposition to my enrolling in the scientific course, which was then entirely a man's college. ... All kinds of discouraging predictions were made that I would fail, that it was impossible or a woman to do the kind of work I was undertaking."

Hebard later resumed her studies by correspondence and earned an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1885. Finally, again by correspondence, she received her Ph.D. in political science from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1893.

Hebard made her way west in 1882 to Cheyenne, eight years before Wyoming became a state in 1890. Hebard arrived at the future capital city in the company of her mother and brothers; Fred, Lockwood, and her sister, Alice. She became part of the social scene with other young people at the newly-constructed Cheyenne Club, where cattle barons, often wealthy Europeans, held sway over Cheyenne. Yet general violence and roughness were still common. Rowdy cowhands wearing guns in the saloons and prostitutes opening plying their trade in brothels made for a sometimes raucous downtown. Citizens were known to hand out their own form of retribution, however, if things got out of hand. For example, in 1883 a crowd lynched an accused murderer, leaving him hanging from a Cheyenne telephone pole.

Hebard's college education distinguished her from such local citizens. The young engineer found work at the surveyor general's office, where she served as the only female draftsman in the city, according to the University of Wyoming archives. Hebard rose to the position of deputy state engineer, reporting at first to Elwood Mead. Mead made his mark drafting Wyoming Territory water laws and later as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Yet engineering was not to be Hebard's calling. Instead, after nine years in Cheyenne, she left her family and ventured 50 miles west across a boulder-strewn mountain range to the railroad town of Laramie. This small town in Southeastern Wyoming, which began as a tent city mid-1860s, was home to a fledgling university when Hebard arrived in 1891. Laramie's scruffy prairie campus became the locale from which Hebard launched a storied career in higher education, devoting more than 45 years (1891–1936) to the University of Wyoming.