Milestones: City of Longmont

The city of Longmont was founded in 1871 by a group of men from Chicago, Illinois looking for a better life.

The settlement initially was called the Chicago-Colorado Colony, and later was named Longmont for the excellent view of Longs Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain peak discovered in the 1820s and named after explorer Stephen Long.

Chicago-Colorado Colony officials had sent Seth Terry to locate a site in the West to move its colony from Chicago. He went as far north as Loveland and Fort Collins and finally settled on the Old Burlington area. Terry was impressed with the possibilities of the available rich farmland and the amount of water in the St. Vrain River.

Alonzo M. Allen and his stepson William H. Dickens had settled on the St. Vrain River south of present-day Longmont in 1859. Here they built the first log cabin in the vicinity. Gradually others settled and the town of Old Burlington came to life. By 1862, it was large enough to boast a U.S. Post Office and a “swing stop” station on the stage line between Denver and other points to the north.

The land for the new town, about 60,000 acres, was purchased by selling memberships among the colonists.

The streets were laid out in a one-square-mile grid plan bounded by present First Avenue on the south, Martin Street on the east, Ninth Avenue on the north and Bowen Street on the west. Wide streets and alleys were surveyed, residence and business lots sold to colony members, and the task of building the new town was under way.

Most of the first colonists were well to do easterners. Three words motivated many people to join the colony: industry, temperance and morality. These ideals were to form a basis for colony membership for many years.

The soil in the area was rich, but the climate was dry. Large irrigation ditches were built to transfer water from the rivers to the fields. Agriculture became the main driving force of the town’s economy.

With the construction of the Colorado Central Railroad in 1877, the town prospered. Newer large-scale agricultural industries were set up in the region, mostly along the railroad and the rivers.

Agriculture attracted numerous immigrants from such countries as Sweden, Germany, Russia, Mexico and Japan. Many of them labored on the farms and gradually merged with the town’s population to give it a multi-racial dimension.

Entrepreneurs like John H. Empson and Denver businessman Charles Boettcher were key to the agricultural development of the area.

Empson opened the J.H. Empson Cannery in 1887, canning peas and other vegetables. It later became the Kuner-Empson Cannery and ceased operations in 1970.

Boettcher, with some partners, founded the Great Western Sugar Co. around the turn of the century .The group of entrepreneurs built the first sugar mill in northeastern Colorado in Loveland in 1901. As the company expanded, the Longmont sugar mill was built in 1903 and operated until 1977.

The development of the town center was setback in 1879 when the 300 block of Main Street was destroyed by fire. Undaunted, entrepreneurs constructed brick buildings on the spots previously occupied by the burned out wood structures. Many of those brick buildings still stand today in downtown Longmont, most notably the Imperial Hotel building and the Dickens Opera House.

In the 1920s politics took a twist. The Ku Klux Klan, riding a wave of statewide popularity in 1925, elected a majority of Klan members to the Longmont City Council. The new council began ousting longtime city officials and replacing them with Klan members.

While in power, the Klan voted to build Chimney Rock Dam, a combination water storage and hydropower project located just above the existing Longmont Dam on the North St. Vrain. Cost estimates increased from $85,000 to $350,000.

But Longmontians had a change of political heart, and in 1927 all Klan candidates for city council were defeated in the April election, and construction was halted on Chimney Rock Dam.

The prospering economy of Longmont sustained setbacks following the New York Stock Market crash in 1929. Many farms were lost during the long-term drought of the 1930s and the Great Depression.

Eventually, farms were re-established, and in 1946, Gibson Manufacturing Co. opened a tractor factory in Longmont, the first new heavy industry to locate in Longmont in many years. But the factory did not last long, closing in 1952.

The 1960s saw a gradual shift toward high-tech industries.

A major development was the construction of an air-traffic control center in 1962 by the U.S. government.

Three years later, IBM built a large facility midway between Longmont and Boulder (Boulder annexed the land into the city). The computer firm was followed by such high-tech storage device companies as Seagate Technologies and Maxtor Corp. that set up shop in Longmont.

During the mid-1990s, the southern part of the city was chosen as the location of the first New Urbanist community in Colorado, called Prospect New Town in southeast Longmont. Founder and developer Kiki Wallace bought the former 80-acre tree farm from his family to build the unique neighborhood.

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