Given for Keeping – a leather collection for early Johnson County, Wyoming
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of original leather design studies of real places.
A September study – Volume I-A.
Given for Keeping is a leather collection for early Johnson County, Wyoming. In the spring of 1900 the county's first drugstore opened in Buffalo, and for decades friends kept handing its pharmacist things worth saving, until the back room held the county's memory. We designed these pieces the same way – one kept thing at a time.
First, the wagons. We drew a covered wagon rolling out along its own ruts, and lettered beside it the plain truth of every early household here – IT ALL CAME BY WAGON. On a luggage tag the line does double duty, since your baggage still crosses the same county. It runs lengthwise on warm tan, on navy, and on a deep green that sits closest to the old wagon paint.
Next, the drugstore. We put the whole county on one apothecary bottle – JOHNSON COUNTY, SPRING 1900, TAKE DAILY – because that is roughly how this county's memory was first dispensed, over a druggist's counter, one story at a time. A toiletry bag is the medicine bag of our day, so the bottle went to its corner, golden tan over chestnut.
Then, the homestead. We drew a log cabin the way the county built them – uneven logs and pale chinking – and set PROVE UP beneath it, the homesteader's term for earning the patent to a claim by staying on it. A keychain already carries the keys to everything you have proved up on, so that is where it went first, on chestnut and on a pale sand greige the shade of the chinking itself.
It looks genuinely beautiful.
A claim was proved up on paper as much as on land, so the cabin also holds the lower corner of the journals – one deep brown, one honeyed russet.
And finally, Buffalo itself, holding still for a camera in 1883 – the timber bridge over Clear Creek, with the young storefronts crowding behind it. The town was barely four years old, and a loose wheel rests by the water right where the camera found one. We ran the scene at generous size across the golden tan catchall tray, so the day's pockets empty out onto the town's first crossing.
Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you'd like anything here made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.