Antique Furniture Restoration Repair & Refinishing of Jackson Hole

The table is sturdy oak with bulbous, machine-turned legs and decorative fluting.Practical in design, the table has nine leaves that extend it to fit a dozen or so people.Children, cowhands, senators and governors have dined at it on the ranch first known as the Boyle place and now the Browns’.Maybe the table was built in the late 1890s or early 1900s in Virginia or Michigan.It could have been peddled around the turn of the 20th century in the Sears and Roebuck catalog, the only shopping outlet many residents in rural Wyoming had.Perhaps it came West on a train to Victor, Idaho, and was dragged over Teton Pass by a horse team.All that’s a mystery. But the history of the Brown family table, as the Browns know it, begins with Grace Miller, who served as mayor in 1920 in Jackson’s all-woman Town Council.Miller arrived in Jackson in 1896 as the new bride of Robert Miller, the third man to file a homestead claim in Jackson Hole, according to the National Elk Refuge archives. They built a two-story log home on the Miller homestead, which is now part of the elk refuge. Miller would have needed a large table for entertaining.

“Their home was considered luxurious for its day,” refuge history says, “and became the center of social activity for the homesteaders and ranchers who began pouring into the valley around the turn of the century.”Robert Miller founded Jackson State Bank in 1914, and Grace was elected mayor of Jackson in 1920 as part of the country’s first all-woman government.All Jimmy Brown knows is that Grace Miller gave the table to his grandmother, Epha Boyle, probably in the mid-1940s.“They were probably the upper crust,” Brown said, “and anybody who was struggling they would help.”Back then the Boyles were one of the ranch families in the valley striving to make ends meet. Epha Boyle was a hard worker who would churn butter and take it and fresh cream to be sold at Grant’s grocery store. She fed her small family and assorted ranch hands with groceries from Grant’s on an account. Still, “at the end of the year, they owed her money,” Brown said.Through the decades of running cows, selling off and developing pieces of the land for the family to survive, the table has stood witness. It’s part of the story of Jimmy Brown’s family.He remembers gathering every New Year’s Day at the table in the late ’40s to late ’60s. Grammy Boyle would serve a special prime rib dinner to a crowd of almost 20: her husband,James, her daughter (Jimmy’s mom) Phyllis, Jimmy’s dad, Arthur, friends, extended family members and neighbors.