Nellemay Gillett Blevins Nontraditional Student Scholarship Endowment

This scholarship award is given to honor the memory and legacy of Nellemay Gillett Blevins. She arrived with her parents and brothers and lived her entire life in the Big Horn Basin. She raised her family with Wyoming values, treating others with a graceful blend of honesty and affection. She lived the spirit of the West.
Nellemay Gillett Blevins was a pioneer in many ways. She was a teacher of life for her family and exemplified that role for the community. She was blessed with a sense of purpose and resolve and the patience to follow through.
Her pragmatic approach enabled her to assess challenges and disappointments and in a gracious manner, resolve them. Nellemay understood that life did not always go according to plan, but that the journey was as important as the goal.
She would be honored to continue supporting education, especially for a student who faces challenges.
Nellemay was born at home near Kingston, Missouri, on July 25, 1916, and with her family arrived at Edgar, Montana, aboard an emigrant train in 1918; their personal belongings filling a box car. Her father, mother and five older brothers, loaded horse drawn wagons (even their automobile was pulled by a team of horses due to the poor road condition) and set off for Powell. The family homesteaded in an area still referred to as the North End. Because the homestead soil contained too much alkali for farming, the Gillett family relocated to the Willwood area in 1932 where the original farm house remains today.
She was a teenager during the 1930’s, a very difficult time for almost everyone in our country, yet she looked to her future with great anticipation. The adversity of the Depression Era did not define her but rather challenged her and along with a sense of humor, carried her a lifetime.
Nellemay was an excellent student, loved reading, learning and playing her piano, but college was not possible because of the Great Depression. Nellemay worked as a clerk at the federal relief office, as a café waitress and at the employment office in Cody. She married her high school sweetheart, Carlus Blevins in 1934.
Nellemay stayed home to raise their five children. During that time she began thinking about the cost of sending their children to college. Always an independent woman, thinking out-loud, “If I had a women’s apparel store, nothing big you understand,” she could create her own business. Her dream of owning a business was realized in 1961.
Nellemay became a personal buyer for her customers and often said, “I thought of customers as my friends.” Her personality was the secret of her store’s success as Nellemay became one of Powell’s most respected business owners.
Her store, “Nelllemay’s,” was a women’s and children’s clothing boutique that remained on Powell’s main street for 32 years. Nellemay retired in 1995 and visited family in Europe and Japan.
Nellemay saw the world through sophisticated eyes. In her own way she was a woman before her time. She wore many hats: businesswoman, volunteer, historian, wife, mother and grandmother. She was a pioneering entrepreneur, along with her husband, in a time when women rarely left their home to begin a business.
In 2012, at age 96, Nellemay’s death marked the end of her remarkable life but not her influence on us to live our lives with a positive view to the future.
Education is the entryway to the rest of life.