Dubois Museum

In the early 1900s, Wyoming’s forests were full of tie hacks: lumberjacks who spent frigid winters chopping down pine trees and shaping them into railroad ties (AKA the wooden beams that hold the train tracks in place). They worked in remote camps, floated massive log drives down rivers each spring, and earned their name from the hacking sound of axes against frozen wood. It was brutal, lonely work that built America’s railways one splinter at a time.

Swen Swenson (real name) spent years as a tie hack in the Dunoir valley before deciding gas pumps beat broadaxes. Around 1934, he opened Swan’s Service Station, but never actually operated it himself. He hired seasonal workers who slept on a cot at the back, surrounded by his floor-to-ceiling collection of Western paperbacks, while Swenson used the wholesale gasoline for supply trucks running goods in central Wyoming.

The station has sat on the Dubois Museum grounds since the 1980s, relocated from its original spot where a Conoco station now stands. Its authentic hand-crank pumps no longer dispense fuel, but they remain as artifacts from an era when filling your tank meant a conversation, not a swipe.