Grant Programs
One chief way in which the Wyoming Historical Society supports the people writing this state’s history is through supporting research and helping finished work reach the public. Our grant programs and funds take the names of storied State Archivists Lola Homsher and Julia Yelvington Adams. Learn more about these opportunities and these women below.
Lola Homsher Research Grant Program
The research grant is the endowment’s largest and best known program. It supports original research into Wyoming history: work in archives, work in the field, photography, oral history, and writing toward a book, an article or an exhibition. The committee reads amateur and professional historians alike, and awards go to people working inside Wyoming and well outside it.
Five projects shared $7,000 in 2025: a rephotography survey of the Absaroka Mountains built on geological survey plates from the 1890s, a study of the 1989 Baker and Shevardnadze meeting in the Tetons, a book on how Wyoming’s mountains became cultural symbols, a history of University of Wyoming football from 1894 onward, and an analysis of how the border between the Idaho and Wyoming territories moved.
Proposals are submitted electronically. Grantees file an interim report and a final report, and the Society supplies a template for the final one. Every grant awarded since 2000 is on record, and that archive will have a page of its own.
At a glance
- Next deadline
- 28 February 2026
- Who may apply
- Amateur and professional historians, in Wyoming and beyond
- How to apply
- Electronically, through the Society
- Reporting
- An interim report and a final report (template to be supplied by WHS)
- By phone
- 307.322.3014
- By email
- vp1.whs@gmail.com
- By post
- Wyoming Historical Society, Lola Homsher Research Grant Program, P.O. Box 33, Riverton, WY 82501
Julia Yelvington Adams Memorial Publication Fund
The Society will consider helping an author publish work on a Wyoming historical subject, whether that is non-fiction, a biography or a reference book. The Publications Committee reviews each application together with the manuscript, so read the fund’s guidelines closely before sending anything.
Julia Yelvington Adams was Wyoming State Archivist for more than twenty-five years. The fund carries her name.
At a glance
- What it supports
- Non-fiction, biography and reference books on a Wyoming historical subject
- Reviewed by
- The Publications Committee, which reads the manuscript alongside the application
- Before applying
- Ask the Society for the fund’s guidelines and read them through
- By phone
- 307.322.3014
- By email
- info@wyshs.org
About Lola Homsher
Lola Homsher came from Basin and became the first practicing archivist for the Wyoming State Archives. She wrote a newspaper column called From the Archives, wrote pieces for radio and for historical groups around the state, and in 1961 took the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best non-fiction for South Pass, 1868: James Chisholm’s Journal of the Wyoming Gold Rush, which she introduced and edited. The Spur Awards, given each year for distinguished writing about the American West, are among the oldest and most prestigious in American letters.
From 1951 to 1965 she directed what is now the Cultural Resources Division of State Parks and Cultural Resources. In that role she edited the Annals of Wyoming and was instrumental in founding this Society. With her associate Henryetta Berry she was a prime mover behind records management and document preservation in Wyoming, and across a long career here she never stopped taking an interest in what the state’s young people were learning.
Where to go next
Awards and nominations
Our publications
