I find this photo interesting because it is a little trip back in Wyoming history. This is 1952. We lived on the SE corner of Hillcrest Drive and Reily Road. My sister is standing at the end of our front walk on Reily Road. Directly behind her is where, a few years later, Laramie Trail would be cut, opening up the Hilltop area of Wyoming. At the far right of the photo can be seen the last house on Hillcrest. On the left edge of the photo is a narrow dirt road that had been made by people driving through the field and woods to reach Fleming Road. It pretty much went straight through to Fleming. I loved to have my dad drive down that road, but he wouldn't do it often because it was so narrow that the tree branches scratched the side of the car.

When blackberry season was upon us, in the late summer, we were visited all the time by little black kids needing a drink of water and wanting to rest in the shade of our front porch. They would show up with their little tin buckets full of blackberries, having spent the day up the dirt road in the plentiful blackberry patches.

Life was different in that part of Wyoming back then. Our neighbor on what would become the NW corner of Reily Road and Oliver Court was Mr. Schneider. On Saturday mornings a few of the neighborhood boys and myself would go sit on Mr. Schneider's back stoop and wait for him, his son Tommy, and neighbor VJ Hentz, to return from squirrel hunting. They would lop off the squirrel tails, dip them in salt, and tie them to our bikes' handlebars. Back then there was nothing but woods and fields and a farm house or two, all the way from Reily Road going west to Winton Road. Laramie Trail, Oregon Trail, Hilltop Lane, Long Lane, et al would change that, for better or worse, in the mid-fifties.

I remember one of my favorite “playthings” back then was located in a large field behind the Emerson’s house at 911 Reily Road. The Emerson house was built in 1951, between the Farber house (1941) and the Schneider’s house (1940). That left one more lot between Emerson’s and Schneider’s, and in 1957 that lot became Oliver Court. However, before Oliver Court was built, everything behind these three houses, to the west, was woods and fields. Now, as I said before, one of my favorite playthings was right behind Emerson’s, abandoned in a field of hip-high grass. What was it? It was an old rusty plow; the kind with a metal seat you sat on controlling the blades, while being pulled by a tractor. I spent hours playing on that contraption.

The plow looked just like this one

I am not old enough to remember where the farm might have been, unless this field might have been part of the Gooseman farm, but that farmhouse was about a half-mile away, as the crow flies, up near Compton Road and Hilltop Lane.