There are nine jars on the shelf above my washing machine right now, and until about two years ago I would have found that a genuinely strange sentence to write about myself.
I grew up in St. Louis. My people bought jam. Then the military moved me around for a long stretch of years, and in 2022 Kimi and I landed in Casper with a kid, a dog’s worth of boxes, and no real sense of what a Wyoming fall was going to ask of us. What it asked, it turned out, was jars.
You notice it fast if you’re paying attention. Somebody at work mentions they’ve got a pressure canner going. A neighbor hands you a half-pint of something ruby-colored with masking tape on the lid and a date written in ballpoint. At the state fair in Douglas last month, I stood in front of the Open Class canned goods display for longer than was strictly dignified — rows and rows of jars, judged and ribboned, every one of them somebody’s August. I wrote about that fair here, and I called the canned goods wall humbling, which it was.
So this fall I’ve been chasing the question underneath all of it: why does this state can everything?
The Short Answer Is Winter
Wyoming’s growing season is a rumor. Depending on whose frost tables you trust, Casper gets somewhere around a hundred frost-free days in an average year — the almanacs put the last spring frost in early June and the first fall frost right around, appropriately enough, the second week of September. Get up in elevation and it’s worse. That’s not a garden season. That’s a window.
Now roll the clock back. Wyoming’s homesteading boom hit in the first decades of the twentieth century, pushed along by the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act, which doubled a claim from 160 to 320 acres, and later by the 1916 Stock Raising Homestead Act, which doubled it again. Families came out to dry-farm ground that had never grown a row crop in its life. They were a long way from a rail depot, a longer way from a store worth the name, and there was no such thing as a truck full of California lettuce arriving in February.
So the harvest had to be made to last. Root cellars held potatoes, turnips and beets in barrels and crates lined with straw. Everything else got dried, salted, smoked, or — increasingly — sealed in glass.
The glass part is a nineteenth-century invention that arrived at exactly the right moment. John Landis Mason patented his threaded-neck jar with a reusable screw-on lid in 1858. The Ball brothers, five of them, started their company in 1880 and began making glass home-canning jars four years later; the “Perfect Mason” jar most of us picture showed up around 1913. By the late 1800s, a rural family could plausibly own enough jars to change how they ate in winter. In a place like Wyoming, that wasn’t a convenience. That was the difference between a monotonous winter and a hard one.
Then Somebody Showed Up to Teach It
Here’s the part of the history I didn’t know at all, and it reframed the whole thing for me.
Home canning at scale wasn’t just folk knowledge passed down — a lot of it was formally taught, by the government, on purpose. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service, tying the land-grant colleges to the USDA, and one of its signature programs was the home demonstration agent: women who traveled out to farms and taught canning, drying, gardening and nutrition.
It had already started with kids. In 1910, Marie Cromer organized the first girls’ tomato canning club in Aiken County, South Carolina — 46 girls, each planting a tenth of an acre of tomatoes, learning to grow them, put them up, and sell them. Those tomato and canning clubs for girls, alongside the corn and pig clubs for boys, are the direct ancestors of 4-H.
Then came the war. The Extension Service was pulled straight into the World War I home-front effort, teaching homemakers to can, dry and preserve what they raised. In 1917 Charles Lathrop Pack founded the National War Garden Commission, which flooded the country with pamphlets on gardening, seed-saving, canning and preventing food waste. Garden plots jumped from roughly 3.5 million in 1917 to more than 5.2 million in 1918. Canning clubs sold their output to the Army and Navy by the railcar.
World War II ran the same play, bigger. A January 1944 poll found that 75 percent of American housewives canned, averaging around 165 jars apiece that year. Sit with that number. A hundred and sixty-five jars. Per household. I made about two dozen this whole season and needed a lie-down.
That’s the machinery that built the habit. Two generations of American women were taught canning as patriotic infrastructure — and in a rural, isolated, short-season state, the lesson had a much longer half-life than it did in a city with a supermarket on the corner.
Why It Never Went Away Here
Plenty of the country let the skill lapse sometime after 1955. Wyoming didn’t, and I think there are four honest reasons.
- The season never got longer. Frost still comes when it comes. If you want your own tomatoes in January, the math hasn’t changed since 1912.
- The distances are still real. Wyoming gets called a frontier state for a reason. In rural areas here, a food desert is defined as living ten or more miles from a grocery store, and some families drive a great deal farther than that for anything resembling a full produce section. A stocked pantry isn’t nostalgia in that situation. It’s planning.
- The fair. This is the piece an outsider underestimates. Canning is a competitive sport in Wyoming. Open Class food preservation at the state fair and at county fairs across the state takes entries in jellies, jams, preserves, marmalades, conserves, butters and syrups; canned fruits, juices and pie fillings; canned vegetables and meats; pickles, relishes, salsas and chutneys; and dried foods. There are rules — standard Mason jars, two-piece metal lids, and judges who can only open the soft spreads for tasting. Wyoming 4-H still runs a Food Preservation project, and entries come with a written explanation of the process. Kids are still being handed this.
- It’s identity. A jar with somebody’s handwriting on the lid is a small, specific way of saying: I was here in August, and I thought about you in February.
The Extension Agents Never Left, Either
This surprised me most of all. The home demonstration agent didn’t vanish into history — she just got a website and a phone number.
University of Wyoming Extension still teaches home food preservation across the state: pressure canning, boiling water canning, fermentation, freezing, dehydration. They publish Preserving Food in Wyoming, updated in 2024. They maintain a Wyoming altitude chart, which genuinely matters here — elevation in this state runs from about 3,000 feet to 13,800, and your altitude determines your processing pressure or time. And they will test the dial gauge on your pressure canner for accuracy, by appointment, for free. Gauges should be checked yearly, and one that’s off by more than two pounds needs replacing.
Free gauge testing is the single most Wyoming public service I have ever heard of, and if you own a pressure canner and haven’t called your county office, call your county office.
If you’re starting from zero like I was, you don’t need much — a water bath canner and a basic jar-lifter kit will get you through every fruit spread in this post. Get your recipes from a tested source, not a random search result. Extension says it more politely than I will: this is chemistry, and botulism is the failure mode.
Two Jars, One Season
My own entry into all this has been small and fruit-flavored. In May I wrote up chokecherry jelly, the most iconic preserve in the state and the one that taught me to stop squeezing the jelly bag. This month it was wild plum jam, picked off a stretch of brush I’m not going to describe with any precision, because I’ve learned how that works out here.
Two recipes. Nine jars. Against 165 jars a year and a hundred and fifteen years of women who did this because the alternative was a thin winter, it’s nothing. But standing in my kitchen at eleven at night listening for that little metallic ping, I understood something I hadn’t when I moved here: this isn’t a hobby the state kept for charm. It’s a practical answer to a real place that happened to turn into a culture along the way.
My son is five. He thinks the jars are for looking at. Give it time.
If you’re putting up food this fall — first batch or fortieth — I want to see it. Tag @wyofood. Show me the shelf.
— Sean