Wyoming's Banana Peel Problem: From Street Food to Fatal Hazard

For decades, the banana peel was a common sight on sidewalks across the United States, serving as both a convenient wrapper for portable food and a frequent cause of injury. In Wyoming, the presence of the fruit on local streets dates back to the late 19th century, bringing with it a specific set of hazards that local residents had to navigate daily.

The connection between Wyoming and the banana trade began with Otto Franc, who established the Pitchfork Ranch near Meeteetse. Before moving west to seek better health conditions, Franc worked in the fruit business with his older brothers, Carl and Charles. Carl Franc is credited with importing the first bananas to New York in 1866. The brothers formed the Frank Brothers firm, later known as the Aspinwall Fruit Company, to ship fruit from their plantation in what is now Colombia to markets in New York and Philadelphia. Their business model helped transform the banana from a rare tropical novelty into a standard item in American grocery stores.

Bananas arrived in Wyoming at least a year before Otto Franc scouted the Bighorn Basin. In 1877, the Cheyenne Daily Leader reported that a Nebraska granger encountered a bunch of bananas in Cheyenne for the first time. While Cheyenne newspapers had covered the banana trade since 1868, this 1877 article marks the first recorded mention of the fruit physically present in Wyoming. By that time, the fruit had moved west, and with it came the issue of discarded peels.

The humor surrounding banana peels emerged in print two years after that first local mention. In 1879, the Cheyenne Daily Leader published a joke quoting the Cincinnati Commercial, which suggested that an orange or banana peel, rather than an apple, might have caused Adam's fall. This gag became a staple of American slapstick comedy, evolving from newspaper humor to vaudeville acts and silent films. The joke mocked a real problem: sellers marketed bananas as street food with natural wrappers, but the resulting piles of rotting peels on sun-baked sidewalks became slippery obstacles that caused black eyes and broken bones.

The most severe incident occurred in 1905 at the Wyoming State Capitol. Julius Wellnitz, the building's beloved caretaker, slipped on a banana peel and died two weeks later. The Cheyenne Daily Leader covered the event with the headline, “BANANA PEEL DEATH’S AGENT.” Wellnitz and his family were the only residents to live inside the Capitol, residing in a garden-level apartment. For over a decade, Wellnitz maintained the heating system and tended the grounds, creating one of Cheyenne's most notable gardens. His wife, Mattie, ran a lunch counter from her kitchen to serve lawmakers during legislative sessions, though there is no record of her serving bananas.

Following Wellnitz's death, the Capitol Commission closed the building so the family could hold a funeral in their home. The incident highlighted the danger posed by discarded fruit waste. A year after Wellnitz's fall, the Saratoga Sun reported that the banana peel epidemic was a key factor in New York City's sanitation efforts. In 1895, Civil War colonel George Waring organized the city's first street sweepers and public compost facilities to address the waste. Waring also established the Juvenile Street Cleaning League, recruiting children to report directly to him and confront litterers.

Similar anti-peel campaigns took place across the country, including in Wyoming. The Saratoga Sun urged readers to encourage children to throw peels from sidewalks into streets. While less militant than New York's organized street cleaning, Wyoming's children were frequently recruited for early sanitation tasks, ranging from killing flies to picking up rotting fruit waste.

The Franc brothers facilitated the distribution of bananas to American households, but the task of managing the resulting waste fell to the public. In Wyoming, this burden often landed on children who helped keep sidewalks clear of the slippery debris that had become a defining feature of urban life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.