Boulder: A Sense of Time and Place Revisited

By Silvia Pettem

Journey with Silvia Pettem through Boulder's history in Boulder: A Sense of Time & Place Revisited. Watch the evolution from a frontier mining town to the "Athens of the West." Learn of murder and bootleggers in the 1920s, survive the Great Depression and follow Boulder's postwar growing pains as the city matures and residents reflect on its past. Each article is a story in itself but only a small piece of what makes Boulder the city it is today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614232605

Book preview

photographs.

Part I

Pre-1900

BLEAK HOLIDAY INSPIRED CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

When early Boulder settler Morse Coffin wrote his reminiscences of Christmas in Boulder in 1859, he called himself a sort of mild crank on the subject of hospitality. To him, the holiday had meant kindness to one’s fellow man, particularly when it came to offering food. But Coffin’s first Christmas in Boulder wasn’t what he had in mind.

The Colorado gold rush got underway in the spring of 1859. In May of that year, twenty-three-year-old Coffin and two friends left the farmlands of Illinois to seek their fortune in the West. They ended their journey two months later in the small settlement of Boulder.

The county’s first wheat crop was yet to come, and the price of flour was high. Coffin found a job in a sawmill, which paid for flour, sugar, coffee and other staples hauled from the states. He claimed that his sole purpose in working at the mill was to make grub for the winter.

Coffin and a friend, Jim, lived in a shack on high tableland in the vicinity of today’s Table Mesa. A few days before Christmas, when the men’s provisions were low, Jim went to Denver for supplies. Coffin was left to fend for himself.

On Christmas morning, being alone, the ground mostly bare so tramping was easy and the weather fine, I decided to take a hunt and try for some meat, wrote Coffin. With two small biscuits in [my] pocket, also matches and a trifle of salt, I started to climb the high mountain directly to the west.

The cooking area of this Boulder County miner’s cabin was typical of that used by Morse Coffin and others in 1859. Courtesy of the author.

After a discouraging day, Coffin wandered down to the collection of log cabins that made up Boulder. Jim hadn’t arrived, so Coffin visited a Mr. P. Right in front of him, Mr. P. took a loaf of bread out of his Dutch oven and began to eat.

He sat at his table and ate it without one word of invitation to me, wrote Coffin. To say I was disgusted, hurt, and angry is putting it mildly. There was no place at that time where meals were sold. Even if there had been, all of the partners’ gold dust had gone to Denver with Jim.

Coffin then went to another Boulder cabin, where he had stored a gun and an overcoat. In the company of more friends, he spread out an oilcloth, propped his boots up as a pillow and prepared to spend the night.

About the time I was fixing my bed, my three friends took their nice brown biscuits from the skillet and seated themselves to an appetizing evening meal, he stated. Like the loaf at the other place, the biscuits looked good to me, but I was to have ne’er one of them.

Neither was Coffin offered anything to eat the next morning. He went home and had to wait until the evening, when Jim returned from Denver with the grub.

In his writings, Coffin stated that he had decided on that Christmas Day that no one would ever come to him and say, I was hungered and ye gave me no meat, I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink, I was a stranger and ye took me not in.

BOULDER’S EARLY SETTLERS WERE AVID FRUIT GROWERS

Marinus Smith arrived in Boulder in June 1859 and established a mail service. Before long, however, he turned his attention to raising fruits and vegetables. When asked if he would live to see the trees he was planting bear fruit, his reply was, Old men plant trees, young men can’t wait.

Boulder’s settlers came with a variety of work skills, but several of the early residents gave up their previous occupations for fruit farming. Instead of continuing the jobs they had in the East or making careers out of mining, they tended orchards and fruit farms within today’s city limits of Boulder. The fruit trees in bloom in the city today are annual reminders of the city’s long history of horticulture.

Vineland Farm was one of several fruit farms within today’s city limits of Boulder. Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society Collection.

Smith lived at Sixteenth and Grove Streets. Within a few years, the gardens that surrounded his home were described by a newspaper reporter as a wild paradise of shrubbery, fruit and shade trees. Because of his impressive rhubarb crop, he was given the nickname Pie Plant Smith. Marine Street was named in his honor.

Another settler who came to Boulder County in 1859 was British immigrant John Brierley. He tried his hand at gold mining in Gold Hill and Ward until 1865, when he decided he’d rather raise and sell fruit and flowers in Boulder. He also operated a cider mill.

Brierley built a stone house on west Pearl Street near Boulder’s Red Rocks. Just below the sandstone outcrop, he planted apple and pear trees, grape vines, currants, gooseberries, raspberries and blackberries. He made several trips back to his native country to procure a variety of new stock for his orchards and gardens.

Joseph Wolff, a former antislavery journalist, also raised fruit. In 1860, he moved from the East and wrote articles for the Rocky Mountain News and the Central City Register before writing for Boulder’s first newspaper, the Boulder County Pioneer.

In 1864, Wolff homesteaded 160 acres east of Twelfth Street—now Broadway—between today’s Alpine and Grape Avenues. In 1883, he built a brick home that faced Twelfth Street. Although another structure was built on the Wolff home’s front lawn, the former residence is still standing near Broadway’s intersection with Elder Avenue.

Wolff planted strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, grape vines and apple trees. He named his property Rattlesnake Ranch but probably sold more fruit after he changed it to the Orchard Grove Fruit Farm. In 1877, a reporter called the property a flowering oasis in the desert. Today, the former fruit farm encompasses the Wolff, Washington and Garden Homes Subdivisions.

On the west side of Twelfth Street/Broadway, rancher William Newland planted 11 of his 240 acres in strawberries. Newland’s farm became the Newland’s Subdivision. To the north was the home and extensive apple orchard of Boulder County treasurer James P. Maxwell.

Vineland Farm was on land that now is part of the University of Colorado campus.

Some of Boulder’s fruit trees are remnants, or grafts, of the trees of these pioneers. If Smith and the others were alive today, no doubt they would be glad to see the fruits of their labor.

THE COLORADO CENTRAL WAS BOULDER’S FIRST RAILROAD

Boulder city officials have identified a site near Thirtieth and Pearl Streets as the most promising location for a train station, provided a commuter line is built along U.S. Highway 36. History often repeats itself, and this is a good example. The location is very close to the site of Boulder’s first depot, built for the Colorado Central Railroad in 1873.

The Colorado Central was the first of sixteen railroads to reach Boulder. Local residents scraped together $200,000 in bond funds to enable the company to begin construction in Boulder County.

Ernest Pease, who was living on a farm east of Boulder at the time, wrote in his memoirs:

One bright morning, as I was at work in the field, I chanced to look to the east, and there coming over the hill, on the prairie where the cattle were accustomed to feed, was a steam engine and [railroad] cars. They were laying the track just ahead of the train.

When this photo was taken in 1883, the Colorado Central Railroad had pulled into the Tenth Street depot in downtown Boulder. Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society Collection.

The rail line had come from Golden and went through the site of Broomfield and on to Louisville before passing through Boulder, Longmont and, eventually, Cheyenne. The Colorado Central was backed by Boulder County farm owner (and later, senator) Henry Teller, who was the company’s president.

Not everyone, however, was pleased with the railroad’s arrival. A fierce rivalry developed between Teller—who favored the development of Golden—and Colorado territorial governor John Evans, who represented the business interests of Denver.

Evans promoted the Denver & Boulder Valley Railroad, which was the second railroad to reach Boulder, five months after the Colorado Central. The Denver & Boulder Valley ran between Boulder and Brighton, with connections to Denver and Cheyenne.

The two railroad companies even built separate frame depots. The Colorado Central’s depot was out in the country, at the time, near the intersection of today’s existing railroad tracks and Pearl Street. The Denver & Boulder Valley’s depot was at Twenty-third and Pearl Streets.

A sixteen-passenger horse-drawn omnibus, with scenes of Boulder Canyon painted on its sides, met the passengers at the train stations and transported them downtown.

The Colorado Central’s depot was used by its passengers until 1876, when it was demolished, and then all trains used the Twenty-third Street depot. That building was torn down in 1883, when yet another company, the Greeley Salt Lake & Pacific Railroad, extended its tracks into downtown. The company then built its frame depot—used by all three railroads—at today’s Canyon Boulevard and Tenth Street.

Throughout the years, Boulder’s railroad system continued to grow, with more railroads and more depots spread all over town. The proposed new train station will bring rail passengers back to the site where all of the city’s rail transportation began.

Two months after the Colorado Central came to Boulder, a newspaper editor wrote that prior to its arrival, the town had been resting easily and lazily in supposed complete grandeur. Of the town after the coming of the railroad, he stated, Boulder has arisen as from slumber. It is now in the full tide of push and enterprise.

BOULDER’S LANDSCAPE DELIGHTED EARLY JOURNALISTS

A Rocky Mountain News reporter with the pen name Typo wrote of Boulder in 1865, On the west, within a mile, the grand old monarchs of creation rise, pile on pile, presenting an eternal scene of beauty and grandeur.

Mollie Dorsey Sanford, a young midwestern bride, was equally impressed in July 1860, when she and her husband passed through Boulder on their way to the mines of Gold Hill. In her diary, published years later, Sanford wrote that Boulder was a picturesque place for habitation…sheltered under the shadow of immense mountains.

Boulder Falls and Boulder Canyon impressed early visitors to