Boulder

The Courthouse on Pearl Street

The Boulder County Courthouse on Pearl Street was designed by local architect Glenn Huntington and built of stone taken from the approaches of an abandoned railway bridge west of Boulder; the state guide dates it to 1934, a later register history to 1933.^2,3 Boulder is the seat of Boulder County and home of the University of Colorado, twenty-five miles northwest of Denver, and the Colorado Encyclopedia gives its population as 97,385.¹

Aikins, Left Hand, and Boulder City

In the fall of 1858 Captain Thomas Aikens, as the state guide spells him, climbed the wall of old Fort St. Vrain and then led a small party from the main emigrant train to settle on the site of Boulder; the Colorado Encyclopedia spells him Thomas Aikins.^1,2 Niwot, or Left Hand, the Arapaho leader, told the party in English to leave, then let them stay the winter on their promise to go in the spring.^1,4 The state guide relates, so it is said, that Left Hand pointed to Donati’s comet and told the settlers its tail pointed back to when the stars fell, “as thick as the tears of our women shall fall when you come to drive us away.”² On January 16, 1859, Aikins’s son James and several others found placer gold on a fork of Boulder Creek and set up a mining camp called Gold Hill.¹ On February 10, 1859, Aikins, A. A. Brookfield, and fifty-three other men formed the Boulder City Town Company to serve the mining camps from the mouth of the canyon.¹ The town was named Boulder City for the many large stones in the vicinity, and G. W. Grege and T. W. Fisher were hired to plat it.² The Wellman brothers, Henry, Luther, and Sylvanus, began plowing the day after they arrived in August 1859 and sowed an acre of turnips; grasshoppers struck the end of their cabin and fell a foot deep, and the turnips were “suddenly devoured,” the first crop planted in Boulder County.² According to a local historian quoted in the state guide, the 70 log houses along Pearl Street had splint roofs and dirt floors, and Bill Barney’s hall, the first with a whip-sawed board floor, was dedicated by a dance attended by 200 men and the 17 ladies of the town.²

The Slump, Caribou Silver, and the University

The Horsfal mine carried Boulder and Gold Hill for several years until what the Colorado Encyclopedia says is known as “the slump of 1863,” and the state guide calls the 1860s lean years for Boulder City.^1,2 In 1861 Boulder County became one of the original seventeen counties of Colorado Territory and the Treaty of Fort Wise removed the Arapaho from the Front Range; in 1864 Niwot was shot down at Sand Creek as he held up his hands and called out in English for Chivington’s troops to stop.^1,4 The legislature created the University of Colorado on November 7, 1861, and designated Boulder as its seat.² Silver found in 1869 at Caribou, near present-day Nederland, sent mine revenue down a new road through Boulder Canyon, and by November 1871 the town was incorporated.¹ The Colorado Central and the Denver & Boulder Valley railroads arrived in 1873, and brick and stone buildings began to replace the frame businesses on Pearl Street.¹ In 1874 the legislature put up $15,000 for the university on condition that residents match it, and Captain David Nichols rode all night from Denver with the news; the money was subscribed at once.^1,2 The cornerstone of Old Main was laid September 20, 1875, five tons of iron bolts and anchors kept the building from collapsing of its own weight, and the first freshman class, of twelve, enrolled in 1878.²

The Flood of May 1894

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1894, rain fell through the day and into the night, and by daybreak Boulder Creek was pouring out of the canyon narrows onto the flats.⁵ Harvey Poole and a friend were standing on the Sixth Street Bridge when it broke in half, and both men leaped to the north bank.⁵ The creek, normally thirty feet wide, spread several hundred feet across, and around noon a crowd watched the water hammer at the foundation of Jacob Faus’s house until it floated off.⁵ By day’s end every road, railroad, and bridge was gone, yet the flood did not kill a single resident of Boulder.⁵

Chautauqua, the Pearl Street Mall, and the Courthouse Licenses

In April 1898 voters approved buying the 75-acre Bachelder Ranch for the Chautauqua, where a marker says the city’s mountain parks began; the state guide credits a group of Texas vacationists with founding it.^2,6 When the state guide counted about 4,000 university students in 1939-40, Boulder had 11,223 people and “Room to Let” signs in many windows.² A pedestrian mall built in 1976 and 1977 closed Pearl Street to traffic between Eleventh and Fifteenth streets.¹ The Downtown Boulder Historic District, registered in 1980, holds Queen Anne, Italianate, Romanesque, Classical Revival, and Art Deco buildings.^3,7 The White-Davis Mercantile Building held a dry goods store without a break from 1874 until Brooks-Fauber closed in 1986.⁸ The state guide recorded a gray granite monument at 15th and Walnut on the site of a one-room clapboard schoolhouse of 1860, which it calls Colorado’s first, where Abner R. Brown taught some 40 children.² On March 26, 1975, County Clerk Clela Rorex issued a marriage license to a same-sex couple at the courthouse, and her clerks crossed out man and woman on the forms and wrote in person.³