The Other Evanston, The One Out West
Evanston RoundTable, Sept. 19, 2019
Thirteen hundred miles straight west is that other Evanston, the one we occasionally get confused with, the one we sometimes think about, the one in the southwest corner of Wyoming.
What’s it like?
“It’s a really nice town with good people,” says Mayor Kent Williams.
The mayor should know. He has lived there 35 years and raised a family of four, with two grandchildren and two more on the way—all of whom live nearby.
In many ways the two Evanston cities are dissimilar. Our western namesake is 90% white, with few people of color. (We’re 66% white, 17% black and 10% Asian.) The western Evanston lies at an elevation of 6,750 feet, in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. (We’re 585 feet, with no foothills in sight, unless you count Mount Trashmore.) Their closest metropolis is Salt Lake City, 90 miles west. (We are across the street from the nation’s third-largest city.) Hunting is popular, so as with the rest of Wyoming, guns are widespread. “We like our Second Amendment rights,” says Mayor Williams. And the western Evanston is a lot more sparsely populated: 1,200 people per square mile vs. almost 10,000 here.
Still, there are some similarities, . . .