Cracks in the wall of the Sheridan Inn were the only clue that something was going drastically wrong with the historic building that Buffalo Bill Cody built in the 1890s.
It was a little more than 20 years ago in the early 2000s, and Edre Maier, then executive director of the Sheridan Heritage Center which owned the Inn, was told not to worry about it.
It was just routine settling and normal for a building more than 100 years old.
“One of my board members said, ‘You’re a girl, you don’t know anything that you’re talking about,’” Maier said.
But Maier wasn’t convinced that the cracks in the wall were nothing to worry about. And, while it might be true that she was a girl and knew little about building construction, she knew how to find those who did know.
She brought in a specialist from Colorado, who used ground-penetrating radar to look into the problem non-invasively.
The prognosis was dire.
“They said we had two years to save it,” Maier said. “But we got into it, and we didn’t have six months before it fell into Fifth Street.”
Saving the Sheridan Inn this time would ultimately be a $6 million project — a lot of money to raise at the