This is a nice rendition of the Territorial Seal of Wyoming on the Big Hollow Food Coop building in Laramie. We've featured this building before, but we missed the seal in our prior photographs. Indeed, one of our remote roving contributors to this blog just picked this one up.
Wyoming has a complicated history in regard to seals, and this one was actually the state's third. This is additionally slightly complicated by the fact that some versions have the year 1868 at the top, rather than 1869. 1869 is, I believe, correct.
The seal depicts a mountain scene with a railroad running in the foreground in the top field. In the bottom left it depicts a plow, shovel and shepherd's crook, symbolic of the state's industries. The bottom right field depicts a raised arm with a drawn sabre. The Latin inscription reads Cedant Arma Togae, which means "let arms yield to civil authority", which was the territorial motto.
This seal was an attractive one and in some ways it was a better looking seal than the one the state ultimately adopted. The state actually went through an absurd process early in its history in attempting to adopt an official state seal that lead, at one time, the Federal mint simply assigning one for the purpose of large currency printing, which featured state seals at the time. Part of the absurdity involved the design, which was describe in the original state statute rather than depicted, which lead to the sitting Governor hiring his own artist as he didn't like the one art of the one that had been in front of the legislature. That caused a scandal as the one that he picked featured a topless woman, which had not been a feature of the legislative design, and ultimately it was corrected to the current design.
All in all, looking at the original one, I think they could have stuck with it.
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