History

Cheyenne VA Medical Center

On May 4, 1934, during the Great Depression and President Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Cheyenne VA Medical Center opened its new campus in southeastern Wyoming with 7 red brick buildings. The construction project started in 1932, near the end of President Herbert Hoover’s administration and the beginning of the VA building boom. The number of VA hospitals more than doubled from 45 hospitals in 1930 to 97 hospitals in 1945 when WWII ended.

Unlike many VA hospitals at the time, the VA hospital in Cheyenne didn’t treat tuberculosis or mental health patients. The original hospital provided a maximum of 133 beds for only inpatient general medicine and surgery care.

Over the years, our inpatient and outpatient services greatly expanded as the hospital continued to grow:

• In 2006, we built a 23,000-square-foot clinical addition to our main campus for outpatient primary and specialty care services. 
• In 2012, we added another 20,000-square-foot section to our hospital for outpatient primary care.
• In 2013, the National Register of Historic Places listed our medical center and its 15 buildings for their striking Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles.
• In 2014, we added another 13,000 square feet to our hospital for a new 10-bed residential rehabilitation treatment facility.

We now have 22 general-medicine beds, 10 rehabilitation-treatment beds, and 50 nursing-home beds in our main hospital building. We  provide outpatient care at our medical center in Cheyenne, Wyoming in addition to our 8 community-based clinics in Fort Collins, Greeley, Sterling in Colorado; Laramie, Rawlins, Torrington, and Wheatland in Wyoming and Sidney in Nebraska.

Cheyenne Healthcare System is part of the Veterans Integrated Service Network 19 (VISN 19), which operates 8 health care systems across 10 states. VISN 19, also called VA Rocky Mountain Network, spans 540,000 square miles and is geographically the largest VISN in the contiguous United States.

Learn more about the history of VA