Laramie

What Does the Name Laramie Mean?

Laramie comes from the French family name La Ramée, which is built on Old French ramée, meaning "boughs" or "branches," and ultimately on Latin ramus, "branch." The original sense was concrete and descriptive: a ramée was a mass of cut or growing branches, and by extension a leafy arbor or bower. As a surname it was most likely topographic, given to someone who lived by an arbor or a stand of trees, so the literal translation is "boughs of a tree" rather than a statement about a person's character. The French form keeps the article separate and carries the accent (La Ramée); the English form, used in the United States, runs the article into the name and drops the accent. The surname was already in use in France well before it crossed the Atlantic - the sixteenth-century logician Pierre de la Ramée, known in Latin as Petrus Ramus, is one documented bearer - though the American place name and the given name derived from it descend from a different line of the family name's use in New France and the fur trade.

Laramie Name History & Origins

The name reached English through the Rocky Mountain fur trade. A French-Canadian trapper named Jacques La Ramée, whose surname also appears as LaRamee and Laramie, worked the North Platte country in the 1810s. A long-repeated traditional account holds that he vanished from his camp around 1820 and that the river where he was lost was named for him; the documentary record of his life is thin, so the story is best treated as tradition rather than firm history. What is documented is the result: the stream became the Laramie River in English, with the French article absorbed into the name and the accent dropped.

The place name then multiplied across the region. A fur trading post built near the mouth of that river in 1834 was first called Fort William, then Fort John, and was renamed Fort Laramie after the U.S. Army bought it in 1849; it became a well-known stop on the emigrant trails west. The Laramie Mountains and the Laramie Plains took the same name. When the Union Pacific Railroad pushed across the territory in 1868, a townsite beside the tracks was laid out as Laramie, Wyoming.

As a given name, Laramie is an American usage drawn from these Wyoming place names rather than from a saint, a biblical figure, or a medieval naming tradition. It came into use in the twentieth century and has been given to both boys and girls. The name was also the title of the NBC Western television series Laramie, which ran from 1959 to 1963, and that series is the best-known appearance of the word in popular culture.