C.J. Box Led the Parade. The Old Corral Was Rebuilt Twice.

The parade started at 9 a.m. on September 12, with acclaimed Wyoming author C.J. Box riding as Grand Marshal down through downtown Centennial. Somewhere along that route, the procession passed the Old Corral Hotel & Steakhouse, the closest thing Centennial has to an institution people plan trips around. What most of the crowd lining that route didn't necessarily stop to think about is that the building in front of them isn't the original. It's not even the second one. Fire has taken the Old Corral down twice since the site first went into the restaurant business in 1944, and what stands there now is the third structure to carry the name.

That detail says more about how Centennial actually works than the parade itself does.

A Town of 364 Threw a 150th Birthday Party

Centennial's population sat at 292 in the 2020 census and had grown to an estimated 364 by 2025, a jump of roughly a quarter in five years for a town most people drive through on their way to the Snowy Range. A community that size doesn't have a marketing department or an events staff. What it has is the Nici Self Museum, the Centennial Library, and a handful of businesses that have been doing double duty for generations, and on September 12 all three ran the day.

The Laramie Boomerang reported that the morning parade fed straight into an afternoon of face painting, craft vendors, food trucks, and live chainsaw carving on the museum grounds, along with a visit from Smokey Bear. Down the street, the library ran a book sale from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. alongside presentations from local historians on the town's past. Organizers behind the celebration described it plainly: the day was a chance to honor the town's history and the people who built it, while looking ahead to the next 150 years. Nobody had to import that story from outside. It was already sitting in the buildings.

The Depot That Never Left

The Nici Self Museum occupies the actual 1907 Centennial Railroad Depot, moved from its original spot on the west side of the tracks to its current location on the edge of town. The depot is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has anchored the museum since the Centennial Valley Historical Association organized it in the early 1970s as part of a push to be recognized as a Bicentennial community. The museum is named for Berniece "Nici" Self, one of its founding members, and it is still run entirely by volunteers rather than paid staff. In September, that means it's open only Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., which happened to line up with the celebration date without anyone needing to adjust the schedule.

The depot outlived the railroad that built it. The Laramie, Hahns Peak and Pacific Railway reached Centennial in 1907 after six years of stalls and false starts, and it never got past Walden, Colorado, let alone the Pacific the name promised. Rail service to Centennial ended for good in 1996 and the tracks came out not long after. The building stayed. It just changed jobs, from freight stop to the place where the town keeps its own record of itself.

Same Site, Third Building

The Old Corral has an even rougher relationship with permanence. The site started as a corral and barn holding livestock during the cattle drive era, and it didn't become a restaurant until 1944. Nici and Pat Self ran it as the local watering hole from the 1950s through the 1980s, the same Nici the museum is named for. The building burned down during that stretch, not once but twice, and what customers walk into today is the third version on that footprint. Ownership has changed hands three more times since the Selfs stepped away, and the steakhouse now operates Thursday through Sunday under new owners, still serving the same reputation for prime rib that drew people in from three states before the interstate made the drive easier.

What survived two fires wasn't a building. It was a name and a function. Centennial needed a restaurant and a gathering spot at that spot on Highway 130, and every version of the Old Corral since 1944 has kept filling that role regardless of who holds the deed or what the structure looks like underneath the roof.

What Actually Ran the Day

None of the Sesquicentennial programming came from outside contractors. The parade drew on community organizations and local businesses supplying the classic vehicles and the marching bodies. The museum activities ran on the same volunteer base that keeps the depot's doors open every weekend the rest of the season. The historical presentations at the library came from local speakers who know the town's mining, timber, and ranching history because they lived through pieces of it or grew up hearing it from people who did.

The same institutions that helped run the celebration have weathered changes before. Centennial added roughly 70 residents between 2020 and 2025, alongside long-standing institutions like its museum, library, and the Old Corral. The Old Corral absorbed two fires, and the depot absorbed the end of rail service.

Gold, Timber, and a Name That Predates Both

Centennial's founding has its own version of this durability. Union Pacific logging crews built a work camp on the site in the 1870s to cut lodgepole pine for railroad ties, and after they moved on, prospectors found gold on what became Centennial Ridge in 1875. By 1876, the settlement had a name, chosen for the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rather than for the gold that briefly justified the town's existence. The gold boom didn't last. A copper claim turned up on the ridge in 1896 and fizzled the same way. The timber industry came back strong in the early 1900s and gave the town its railroad and its depot. Every one of those industries has come and gone. The name stuck through all of them, the same way the Old Corral's name stuck through two fires and three ownership changes.

That's the thread the Sesquicentennial pulled into daylight for one Saturday. An acclaimed Wyoming author rode through town as Grand Marshal, Smokey Bear made an appearance, and a book sale ran down the street from a chainsaw carving demonstration. Underneath the novelty acts, the day ran on the same short list of institutions that have kept Centennial functioning since before the railroad ties were cut: a museum in a building that used to move freight, a restaurant that's been rebuilt twice, and a library willing to host historians for free on a Saturday morning.

If a town's 150th birthday party can tell you this much about how it actually runs, imagine what its property records can tell you. Kelly Cooksey has spent enough time in Centennial to know which institutions the town runs on. Let's Connect.