Burns Day

Burns Day opens at seven in the morning with a pancake breakfast. The town lies in eastern Laramie County, a few miles from Interstate 80, reached by an exit onto Burns Road; the 2020 census counted 356 people there. A 2025 festival listing credited the breakfast to LCFD #6. Live music begins at 11 a.m. on the gazebo and plays through the day. In 2025 five bands were to play from 11 until 10 at night.

Pancakes at seven, goats at four

The 2026 festival was held Saturday, June 13. Kayla Madler, past president of the Burns Lions Club, listed its familiar events in the Pine Bluffs Post: a parade, a car and truck show, cornhole, a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, an arm wrestling tournament, bingo, kids’ games, a craft show, a Viking re-enactment, and food trucks. The car and truck show was back for its sixth year in a row. Thirteen food trucks came. The arm wrestling had been billed in 2025 as a multi-state tournament, and the festival’s own page also lists a dunk tank. In a spring post asking for favorite parts of the parade, the club offered tractors, classic cars, horses, parade entries, and candy for the kids.

Two events were new in 2026, both open to all ages. Touch a Truck set out heavy equipment and emergency vehicles after the parade, between the Fire Station and the Community Center. The Goat Roping Jackpot took sign-ups at 3:15, and roping started at 4. Shortly before, the festival page posted: “The goats have arrived!” Bingo was played on the east side of the North Gym at 315 S. Main St. Entry was free, with a donation to the Lions Club “if you’re feeling generous.” The vendors of the craft fair gave the prizes, and three large ones were held for the end.

The 2026 festival also carried the club’s first side-by-side raffle, capped at 500 tickets at $50 apiece. The drawing came between the last two bands. Amie M. was called and congratulated from the stage, and the machine was delivered to her at the club’s post-Burns Day meeting. The gazebo the bands play from had its first makeover from the club four years before. In early June 2026 the Town of Burns, the Lions, Emily and Andrew Leach of Air-O-Fresh, and other residents finished work on the gazebo and the flower pots around it.

Blue button-downs on Main Street

On June 11, 2022, Cap City News reported that every drivable space in Burns was filled with cars, trucks, and trailers, and that parking spilled out nearly to the town limits. Lions Club volunteers wore blue button-downs and were posted all over town. The Roadkill monster truck led a line of cars down the parade route. Riders on horseback represented Cheyenne Frontier Days. A truck pulled members of the Burns High School volleyball and football teams. Members of Donald Eisenhauer American Legion Post 60 of Pine Bluffs saluted the flag and threw candy toward the crowd.

Cody Nusbaum, the club’s treasurer, served as emcee for part of the day and greeted people as they came up to him. “I talked to one gentleman earlier today — I don’t recall his name — but he graduated from Burns [High School] in 1961,” he said. “He lives in Twin Falls, Idaho, now [and] came back just for Burns Day and their school reunion kind of a deal.”

The sources give different crowd counts for the year before. Nusbaum put 2021 attendance at about 5,000. The club’s sponsorship page estimated more than 3,000.

The program in those early years ran wider than it does now. The 2021 edition, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., had a 5K run, a horseshoe tournament, one-pitch softball, dummy roping for children, a petting zoo, a cake walk, a beer garden, and dancing to live music to close the day. The 2022 list added train rides and monster truck rides, and the club’s photographs show street dancing in front of the bands. The Burns Branch Library at 112 Main St. marked the 2021 festival with an outdoor reading party. It had a book exchange, a scavenger hunt, and cookies and lemonade, and the library called the occasion “the return of Burns Day.”

A basketball game and a Lions Club

The word “return” was accurate. According to Nusbaum, Burns Day had been an annual event until about 2012. Then the original volunteers “lost momentum,” and the festival faded away. Around 2020 he was playing basketball in Burns with his daughter and some friends when he thought of bringing it back. He joined with other families in town to found the Burns Lions Club, which began operating in about the winter of 2020–21. The revived festival was first held in 2021.

“My ultimate goal behind this, when I threw the idea of bringing Burns Day back, was to get more community involvement with our students and school and vice versa,” Nusbaum said in 2022. He pointed to the football players who had marched in the parade and then stayed to work as volunteers. “The more you know your neighbors, the more you’re going to trust them,” he said.

The club’s website gave its membership as 32. It said the club spends Burns Day proceeds in the community. It has given money to local first responder units and paid toward eye surgeries, prescription glasses, and one prosthetic eye.

Luther, New Berlin, Burns

Burns had other names before this one. The Wyoming State Library records New Berlin and Luther. WyoHistory.org says the town was founded by Lutheran German immigrants on land offered by the Federal Land and Security Company, which called the area the Golden Prairie District. In that period the railroads advertised dryland farming to immigrant farmers in eastern Laramie County. Some families hired an entire rail car to bring their equipment and livestock to the stop nearest their new homestead. According to WyoHistory.org, Luther prospered with banks, businesses, and a newspaper, the Golden Prairie Herald.

A history of Wyoming written around 1918 gives a different origin. It says the town grew up on the Union Pacific Railroad, twenty-six miles east of Cheyenne, some years after the line was completed, because the area’s stock growers wanted a shipping point.

The Luther Post Office opened on March 9, 1907, with Pearle E. Schuetz as postmaster. Its name was changed to Burns on February 10, 1910, and the town was incorporated in 1917. Jean Bastian and Ruth Mittan published A history of Luther/Burns, Wyoming in 1988. The 1918 history recorded Burns in 1915 as having a bank, a public school building that cost $20,000, electric light and waterworks, Christian, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches, and 230 people.