Sheridan stone house has 127-year wild Wyoming legacy including bootlegging and will now be protected

In the height of the homestead era, families by the thousands moved Westward, gambling everything on grass, water and weather. Few of those homesteads remain today. But just outside Sheridan is a rare exception—a sandstone home known as The Stone House that has survived nearly untouched since 1898.

The house sits on a quiet hill overlooking the Wyoming prairie, where light still hits the Bighorns just so and wind still stirs largely native grasses as it did more than a century ago.

The Sheridan Community Land Trust is working with the home’s owner to establish a historic preservation district that will protect the stone structure and its timeless view for generations. Such districts are rare, said SCLT History Program Manager Kevin Knapp, with few properties worthy of the expense and scrutiny involved.

The district will allow adaptive reuse while locking in what should never be altered—the stone walls, the masonry and the fireplaces.

The house was built by William Bethuran, a European stonemason whose craftsmanship is evident in the 18-inch-thick walls that remain as strong today as in 1898. The home has had just eight owners and even fewer physical changes, its layout essentially unchanged from when its first hopeful homesteaders moved in.

Hard times hit many owners, but the house itself has persisted through homesteading, agricultural booms and busts, the Great Depression and Prohibition.

Among its most colorful owners were Walt and Mary Peters. Walt was a longtime Sheridan County commissioner and upstanding local resident—who also led a double life as a well-known bootlegger. Hidden behind an unassuming closet door, a set of stairs leads to a root cellar where Walt kept five moonshine stills and ran a speakeasy.

Current owner Brian Nix recently discovered Walt’s moonshine inventory list. Among the names: the Sheridan County sheriff himself, a regular customer.

Nix also found that previous owners opened three of the home’s five fireplaces and discovered $8,000 cash inside one—likely just a portion of the ill-gotten gains from Walt’s bootlegging business. Two fireplaces remain unopened.

Nix, a California resident drawn to Wyoming after a near-fatal illness in 2015, plans to begin restoration in 18 to 24 months, spending an estimated $1.5 million. He’s already located two of Walt’s stills at a Sheridan distillery and hopes to return them to the property.

The Stone House sits surrounded by significant archaeological sites, including stone circles and cairns along the ridge. It also lies along the route of the 1897 Iron Riders—the Army’s historic black bicycle corps that tested iron-framed bikes across extreme terrain.

Nix eventually plans to donate the property to the Land Trust. “This house will stand for thousands of years,” he said. “All it needs is for humans not to intervene with it too much.”