Wildfire Burns Harriet Hageman’s Family Homestead, More Evacuations Ordered

Cowboy State Daily ^ | 8/4/24 | Pat Malo

[CFW]

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, was teary-eyed and fought back her emotions talking about her family’s loss this week of her childhood home, which went up in flames when Wyoming’s largest wildfire roared through the Haystack Range.

The Hageman homestead, a rustic cabin-like structure with plastered walls and built into the side of a hill near McGinnis Pass, Wyoming, was destroyed by an uncontained wildfire in rough terrain littered with huge granite boulders and tinder fueled with juniper pinions woodland and sagebrush.

“It’s been pretty devastating,” Hageman told Cowboy State Daily.

Back in Washington, D.C., doing what she does there, Wyoming’s lone U.S. House member was preoccupied with upsetting late-night telephone conversations with her brother Hugh and older sister Julia in Torrington, who lives closest to their 100-year-old mother, Marion, in a local nursing home.

Matriarch of the family, Marion Hageman, hasn’t fully grasped the family’s devastation.

“I just saw her a couple of days ago when I was home. I’m not even sure she even knows about this fire yet,” said Hageman of her mother.

“It was a very old log house, with very thick walls because they didn’t split the wood. It was very cold in the wintertime,” she recalled. “We had one woodburning stove, and we would take Montgomery Ward catalogs when we were younger and put them on the stove and heat them through, and then wrap them in fabric and take them to bed to stay warm.”

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TOPICS: Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events; US: Wyoming
KEYWORDS: forestry; hageman; wildfires; wyoming

[CFW]

How devastating for the Hageman family.

Say a prayer for those in the wildfire's path.