Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, let's talk Gillette One of Gillette's best known and best loved parks is the Dalbey Memorial Park.
Still, even after having had the name for more than 50 years, better known as the Fishing Lake. And it's more than just nomenclature issues confusing non Gillette residents about the park.
When I googled the park to begin researching this episode, I learned that it was a serene and peaceful final resting place for loved ones, was dedicated to honoring the memory of those who had served, had nice tennis courts, and one Google user said in their review that food and service was the best.
Um, er.
But Dalbey Memorial park is not a cemetery, so while your loved ones can rest there in a shelter or on a bench, they cannot rest there finally or eternally. While Dalbey does have a small veterans memorial, I'm pretty sure the site describing it as dedicated to honoring the memory of those who have served was talking about Lasting Legacy Park. Dalbey park has baseball and football fields and basketball and beach volleyball courts, but there aren't any tennis courts, so that one must be confusing it with Bicentennial Park.
And to be honest, I'm not sure where the food and service guy thought he was.
Was he talking about a food truck in the park?
I sort of like to imagine that he crashed a birthday party in one of the shelters, asked someone for some food, handed them some money, and then left wondering where to leave his positive review.
The name issues actually go way back. During my research I found no less than five different things it had been called, including the Fishing Lake, Gillette Trout Lake, Gillette Pond, Edwards Lake and Edwards Reservoir.
In 1968, the park's name was changed to Dalbey Memorial park in honor of former city of Gillette Mayor Denzil J. Dalbey, who was also called Peanuts by his friends and in fact Peanuts Dalbey was the man responsible for the existence of the park in the first place. Born In Missouri in 1905, Dalbey moved to Gillette with his family in 1917. In Gillette he became a carpenter and general contractor and ran for and was elected mayor in 1954.
Then he was re elected six times, serving as mayor for 13 total years. Mayoral terms were only two years back then.
As Mayor, Denzil J. Dalbey was always interested in the growth of the city and was a particular champion of projects that helped children, which is why in 1956 Dalbey proposed to the Wyoming Fish and Game Commission that they acquire some of the land south of town to create an area for public recreational use. In 1957, the land was purchased from private landowners and the park was established under the condition that the city develop the park, provide services and police protection of the area.
Throughout the rest of the 50s and most of the 60s, the park underwent a lot of improvements.
In 58. Wyoming Game & Fish added a dike, drainage works and erosion control.
Local organizations added significantly, like the Lions Club, Rotary Club, JCS and others.
Some things were planned that I don't think happened.
One article talked about picnic areas. Good. More trees. Yes. And a water slide. What? The lake must have been very different then because you should not swim in the fishing lake. And it's been that way for as long as I can remember.
There are probably decades of lost fishing hooks and things in there.
In 1964, a footpath was created to keep kids off the side of the highway as they went to the fishing lake. The next year, According to the news record, the park had had some remarkable developments since that summer. They added a playground and restrooms.
Periodically, Wyoming Game and fish would add trout. It says 1,000 went in in 1961 and 1,626 trout weighing 446 pounds were added in 1964.
I feel like the first one there that must be rounding 1000 is a nice even number.
How many fish are there? I don't know, about one.
And then you have 1,626 fish added in 1964, which is oddly specific.
How do you count the fish? It's not like they'd hold still for you to count them. And I imagine they all look more or less the same.
Did they add them one at a time? Possibly they arrived at that number based on weight. Does an 8 inch trout weigh a little over a quarter pound on average?
But perhaps the most iconic feature of the park is the bridge which lets you cross from one side of the lake to the other without going all the way around.
Here's the news record from June 11, 1964 on the original 154 foot suspension bridge.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: The bridge, which was made possible almost entirely by donated labor and materials, will allow young and old fishermen to cross over to the other side if they find the fishing isn't so good on their side. Due to the length of this body of water, the young fishermen have had to decide at the highway the side they would fish and then stick with their decision or go on a long walk around to the dam on the other side. Four cables at the top of the suspension bridge and two cables at the bottom hold the long span up as well as keep it from bouncing too.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Much later in the article, Mayor Dalbey talked a little bit about who contributed to the project.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Dalbey said there were several firms whose contributions of work and materials made possible the construction of the suspension bridge. Among those named were Jim Goodwin Welding Service, Earl Hanna McGee and McHugh Ready Mix Concrete Co. Austin's Incorporated, Saunders Lumber Co. Stafford well Service, Underwood Lumber Co. Reeves Concrete Products and White Ditching Co. Without the help of these men and firms of Gillette, the Fishing Lake would not have been able to have this bridge, the mayor said.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Contrast that with this description of the building process from an article in the March 22, 1979 News Record when the bridge was being refurbished.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: When the brid was first being built in the spring of 1964, there was very little expenditure of city money for material and construction, says former Fishing Lake park caretaker Ed Hackett. The bridge was designed and its construction supervised by Denzil J. Peanuts Dalbey.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: I think right from the beginning it.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Was his idea, says Hackett, who describes himself as a longtime friend of the former mayor. He had a dedication to that park that you wouldn't believe.
Dahller's experience as a building contractor probably helped him design the structure, but he also possessed a knack for enlisting help from others in public projects. That talent enabled Dalbey to get civic groups and businesses to donate material and labor for constructing the bridge. Peanuts wasn't wealthy, says city Public Works Department purchasing agent Gene Warlow, but I think a lot of money for things like that. The bridge came out of his pocket. He was a pretty good scrounger, too. Warlow remembers quite a bit of that stuff bridge materials he salvaged.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: I think it really paints a picture that when asked about the building of the bridge, Mayor Dalbey only talked about the people who helped him. But he left out that the most significant contributor was probably himself.
In the article, Hackett also recalls how Peanuts Dalbey told him the bridge would hold 64 tons, which Hackett was a bit skeptical about. I mean, I'd be skeptical, too, a bridge built from scraps by the town mayor. But according to Hackett, he later chatted with a visitor to the park who turned out to be a retired bridge engineer who looked at the bridge, did some quick calculations and concluded that the bridge would take somewhere between 60 and 65 tons.
To be honest, I can't imagine how you could have gotten 65 tons onto that bridge, which, based on the pictures, can't have been more than four or five feet wide. So it's not like you could drive two fully laden garbage trucks onto it. Of course, you'll have noticed that the bridge currently in the park is not a suspension bridge. That's because even with repairs in 1979, by 1987 the city council had to make the decision to have the bridge demolished. From the December 8, 1987 news record.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: City engineers feel the 161 foot bridge is unsafe partly because water has eroded the footings beneath each end of the structure. With water depths of up to 8ft in the middle, someone could drown if they were on the bridge when it collapsed, the engineers added. Also, rotting planks must constantly be replaced to keep vertical connecting rods from pulling through holes in the planks.
There's also a question about how much weight the rusted cables will bear.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: I'd guess the answer was no longer 64 tons.
Apparently, the bridge had also grown 7ft at some point because it was declared to be 154ft when they built it. But it was 161ft when they tore it down.
Then they replaced it with a 120 foot bridge in 1988, and that bridge is still there today.
How did they replace a bridge with a new bridge that was 41ft shorter? By moving the land. If you look at the aerial maps of the park from 1982 and 1995, you can see where they built up the shore on each side, squishing the land together to make the new bridge fit.
While that bridge is still there, it was removed for a month in 2020 to take and sandblast and repaint it. And if you want to see what the removal and reinstallation looked like, I linked to a timelapse video of that in the description.
In 1967, Mayor Dalbey asked Wyoming Game and Fish to grant the city a long term lease on the parkland. Wyoming Game and Fish did not grant the lease. Instead, they said actually you can just have it, and transferred ownership of the park to the city on the condition that the property shall continue to be offered for public use without any charge for the fishing being allowed.
That transfer occurred in June of 1967.
Unfortunately, later that month, Mayor Dalbey suffered a stroke and passed away.
That was why one year later, the name of the fishing lake park was changed to Dalbey Memorial park in his honor.
In 1973, there was a minor change to the park that caused a bit of a problem.
From the November 8, 1973 news record.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: A new highway from the Highway 59 Interstate 90 intersection to eight miles south of Gillette is scheduled for construction in the spring of 1974.
The story was revealed when the Gillette City Council announced it would realize $5,000 from the sale of right of way and pavement for alterations to Dalbey Memorial Park. The Wyoming Highway Department has purchased about 3/4 of an acre, a 27 foot strip of the park for $3,700 and will pay the city $1,300 to move the stone entrance back and make other alterations to accommodate the wider road.
The alteration will not affect the lake at all, said Mayor C.H. cliff Davis.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: All good, right? The city gets $5,000 a wider Highway 59 and it doesn't actually affect the lake at all except remember the terms Wyoming Game and Fish set when they granted the park to the city, this was in the news record Barely a.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Week later, a controversy over the sale of part of Dalbey Memorial park to the Wyoming Highway Department by the city of Gillette may jeopardize future grants for development of recreational facilities in Campbell County. The city announced last week that it sold 77 acres of the farm to the highway department which plans on building a four lane highway in the area next spring. The action was taken note of in Cheyenne in the office of the Wyoming Recreation Commission.
Leroy Greeing, Chief of grants and aide in the commission, immediately called Campbell County Recreation Department Director Mike Knouse and informed him that corrective action would have to be taken by the city to restore the original intentions of the grant. Knauss said the area of conflict arose over a part of the grant which was signed in July of 1967 that stated that should an emergency arise where it is essential to use the recreation area for another purpose, the United States Secretary of Interior has the authority to permit a change in use providing the original area is replaced by an area of equal value, development and desirability and serves the same purpose as the original area.
I have a number of questions about this.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Why did the Wyoming Recreation Commission guy call a county employee to complain about what the city did? Is wanting a wider highway an emergency? What area did they add to the park to make up for the 77 acres since the park's founding? Throughout the years there have been many small changes to the park. Playground equipment comes and goes, new tables at the shelters, new artwork and statues. Roads are resurfaced, floods, droughts. The surrounding areas are developed. When the fishing lake and park were founded, that was very much the outskirts of town and now Dalbey park and the fishing lake are surrounded by development on all sides.
The park itself continues to grow and later this year the Dalbey Park Master plan will be unveiled laying out a possible future for the park.
Just like with the City of Pool, the people of Gillette, and in particular City Mayor Denzel J. Dalbey, thought that free recreational opportunities were an important part of the community.
I think that Mayor Dalbey would be pleased and proud of the continued use of the park that bears his name and only be a little disappointed in its lack of a water slide.
Let's Talk Gillette is a production of Gillette Public Access Television and the City of Gillette. For more information on city operations, visit the city's website, gillettewy.gov or follow the City of Gillette on Facebook or Instagram.
