The Blue Front, located on South Front Street, opened as a “Bucket of Blood” sort of saloon and was owned by Con Moyers, one of the men hung during the vigilante uprising of October 1868.
Later, the building became the National Theatre, where many plays and performances were staged. Laramie’s courtroom moved to the National Theatre to seat the world’s first female jurors after the locations where other court cases were held were deemed unsuitable for a proper woman to enter. Even then, it took a great deal of convincing that the theatre was respectable and safe. Justice Howe told the men and women of the jury he had “long seen that woman was a victim to the vices, crimes and immoralities of man, with no power to protect and defend herself from these evils.” Jury duty gave women “such powers of protection.”
In 1869, Augustus Trabing moved his headquarters to Laramie in the old Blue Front Theatre. It was a one-story wooden structure that he painted a bright blue, hence the name Blue Front. When Trabing opened the Laramie Grocery Company at the corner of Garfield and South Second Street, the theatre was used as a warehouse.