"Best Town on Earth" Sign, Upton, Wyoming, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

"Best Town on Earth" Sign, Upton, Wyoming, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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"Best Town on Earth" Sign, Upton, Wyoming, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-9EBD29

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Someone in Upton, Wyoming looked at a scattering of frame buildings, a grain elevator, and a lot of empty prairie, and decided the accurate civic slogan was not "pleasant" or "convenient" but "Best Town on Earth." This is the confidence of a town that has never been anywhere else and sees no reason to qualify the claim. The sign stands alone in a weedy field, guarded by nothing but a telephone pole, which tells you the competition for that title was not expected to show up.

Behind it the town does its actual business without any fuss about superlatives: a scatter of houses, a Quonset-roofed shop, a couple of parked cars, all backed by the flat wall of pine that marks where the Black Hills foothills begin. Nobody in frame is looking at the sign. That is the tell of every small-town boast painted on a board and left facing the highway โ€” it is not for the people who already live there.

The empty lot in front, littered with a stray plank and a rusting piece of equipment, is the honest part of the picture. Whoever hung the sign was selling the idea of Upton to whoever drove through; the vacant ground was just what happened to be there while the town got around to using it.

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