Only two years away from its 150th anniversary, Boulder bears little resemblance to the dusty boomtown it once was. The streets are paved and lined with trees; the campus has ballooned from a single building to more than 100; and few people even know that ogur Central Park was once a squalid shantytown. Yet photos of historic Boulder show that the past is present and often visible in familiar spots all over town.

The “Jungle” once occupied the area between Boulder Creek and Canyon Boulevard, from Ninth to 14th streets. In 1921 the city bought the land from the Colorado & Southern Railroad and tore down the squatters’ homes, making a park to keep vagrants from coming back. Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society collection

Although the first gold seekers arrived in 1858, the town was truly born in 1859, when A. A. Brookfield and 56 shareholders formed the Boulder City Town Company. They platted the town to extend two miles east from the mouth of Boulder Canyon. Boulder’s passion for open space started early: The shareholders created larger lots than the standard Western city lot—50 feet by 140 feet, rather than the usual 25 feet by 125 feet found in Denver. The shareholders divided the lots amongst themselves and sold the remaining lots for $1,000 apiece.

One of Boulder’s earliest settlers was Joseph Brierly, an Englishman who arrived in 1859 to prospect in Gold Hill and Ward. In 1865, left empty-handed from his mining venture, he bought land at the far west end of Pearl Street. Brierly built a house and planted apple and pear trees, grapevines, currants and other berries. He also raised cattle, operated a cider mill, and by 1870 had a greenhouse. Brierly’s home still stands at 207 Pearl Street. (See photo below.)

Brierly's farm. Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society collection

Brierly’s farm anchored the west end of Pearl Street, which by 1866 was already emerging as the main street of Boulder. Pearl Street was dirty and dusty, with rooming houses, saloons and corrals but no trees or sidewalks. In 1865, Andrew J. Macky and Charles Dabney built the first brick structure in Boulder, a commercial building at 11th and Pearl streets. Boulder City became the county seat in 1867, and four years later the town incorporated, dropping the word “City” from its name. The town fathers started a tree-planting program, the legacy of which is visible throughout Boulder today.

Neighborhoods Spring Up

Residential Boulder grew rapidly throughout the 1860s and ’70s. A fashionable suburb sprang up on Mapleton Hill, but the area farther north of town was still open land and orchards. The first brick house in Boulder, belonging to Andrew J. Macky, went up on the corner of Broadway and Pine Street in 1868 (below). Macky, the builder of the first brick commercial building on Pearl Street, was a businessman and banker. He became one of Boulder’s most prominent citizens, serving as the town’s first postmaster, president of the First National Bank, and benefactor of Macky Auditorium and the Elks Lodge at 13th and Spruce streets. His home at 1201 Pine Street started the suburban movement north on Broadway. Within a year, pioneer George Franklin Chase built his home at 1201 Mapleton Avenue, which made him Macky’s closest neighbor.

Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society collection

While houses were spreading north of town, the University Hill area was also becoming a fashionable place to live. Family homes, such as the C.J. Smith house on the corner of 13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, started to fill in the landscape across from the growing university. They were typical Victorian family dwellings, usually two stories with large porches. Many of these old houses still stand today and have found new uses for a new generation. The Smith home, for example, has been adapted to become The Sink. With the growth of the university area, Broadway (then 12th Street), originally a dirt road, became a major thoroughfare connecting University Hill with downtown. The intersection of Broadway and Marine streets, still little more than a dusty crossroads in 1909, got busier in the 1920s. By 1940 it served as the site of the Public Service building and then a Safeway store—and more recently Alfalfa’s and Wild Oats.

Look closely! This house is now The Sink. Photo courtesy University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries. "Now" photo by Judy Morley.

By the turn of the 20th century, Boulder was growing into a cosmopolitan town that gained a fine hotel, the Boulderado, in 1909. (The hotel could accommodate travelers with motorcars, but the staff still transported guests and their heavy trunks from the rail depot in horse-drawn wagons.) Not all of Boulder was fancy houses and hotels, however. Like all Western boomtowns, Boulder had a substantial underclass, and many of them lived in a run-down area known as the Jungle. Located on the south side of Water Street (now Canyon Boulevard) between Ninth and 14th streets, the Jungle was a conglomeration of wooden shacks, lean-tos and improvised structures. The area between Canyon and Boulder Creek was dotted with “female boarding houses” (a euphemism for bordellos), rough saloons and gambling parlors. Jungle dwellers were technically squatters; the Colorado & Southern Railroad owned the land, which provided access for the train tracks. In 1921 the City of Boulder purchased the land. City workers tore down the squatters’ dwellings, filled in the land adjacent to Boulder Creek and made a park to keep the vagrants from coming back.

Boulder Angles for the State Pen

The town grew steadily after renewed mineral strikes at Caribou in 1869 and Gold Hill in 1872, but Boulder had stiff competition for settlers from Denver to the south. Although it was already the county seat, the town competed for other enterprises that would bring economic development. In the 1870s, when the territorial government passed out political plums in preparation for statehood, Boulder lost the state capitol to Denver and the state penitentiary to Cañon City, getting only the third-choice state university. Boulderites made the best of it, coming up with $15,000 in matching funds to assure the building of the university, and breaking ground for Old Main in 1875. When Colorado became a state the next year, the federal government stipulated that 72 sections of land must be set aside for the state university. But in the fall of 1877, when the university enrolled its first 44 students, Old Main still sat alone atop the bluff south of town.

Old Main stood alone in 1877, backed by a row of cottonwood saplings. Photo courtesy University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.

In 1878 a Prussian immigrant, Charles Boettcher, arrived in Boulder and started a hardware store on Pearl Street, laying the foundation for what would become an empire. As his business grew, he erected the building at the southwest corner of 12th (Broadway) and Pearl streets. Within a year he sold the business and followed the silver boom to Leadville. Boettcher went on to become one of Colorado’s most prominent citizens. After making a fortune in Leadville selling hardware and investing in mines, he retired to Denver. On a trip to his native Germany in 1900, Boettcher saw farmers growing sugar beets and decided the plants could grow in Colorado. A colorful story, probably apocryphal, claims that Boettcher made his wife, Fannie, empty all the souvenirs out of her suitcase to make room for sugar-beet specimens. Thanks to the sugar beets, Boettcher made another fortune during his retirement by forming the Great Western Sugar Company and Western Packing Company (sold to Swift in 1912). He also started brokerage houses and the Ideal Cement Company, and purchased the Brown Palace Hotel. Boettcher lived until 1948, dying at the age of 96. His first hardware store still stands at the corner of Broadway and Pearl.

Boettcher's original Pearl Street store became Wilson's Hardware. Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society collection

Flaming Courthouse, Flaming Crosses

Although the Jungle revealed a dark aspect of early Western society, it was not nearly as sinister as the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in Boulder during the 1920s. Beginning about 1915, the Klan reestablished a strong presence in Colorado and other states that had large numbers of recent European immigrants. The KKK targeted immigrants as well as African Americans, burning crosses on the lawns of Catholics and Jews and claiming to stand for “100-percent Americanism.” The Klan had a particularly high membership in Boulder County: in July 1922, 200 Boulder men were initiated. They held their “secret” meetings west of Dakota Ridge, near present-day Linden Avenue. In December 1922, the Boulder Klan paraded along Pearl Street with 63 cars and a float, and in May 1924 they burned a 53-foot-tall by 25-foot-wide cross on Flagstaff Mountain. The Klan even petitioned CU President George Norlin to get rid of Catholics and Jews on the faculty, but he adamantly refused. The Klan’s presence in Boulder began to fade after 1926, when Colorado’s Klan leader had a falling-out with the national Klan administration. By 1929, the Klan died away nationally, with only periodic resurgences.

Klan meeting, North Boulder, 1924. Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder Historical Society collection

As the social strife involving the KKK calmed down, another event shook Boulder’s landscape. The Boulder Courthouse, built in 1882, caught fire on February 9, 1932. The flames started in the cupola and within an hour, the 700-pound clock and the 5 tons of sand used as a clock weight crashed down through the lower floors, spreading the fire. All available firemen were called to fight the blaze, and employees rushed to save vital documents stored in the courthouse. The prisoners, kept in the jail in the basement, were transferred to Longmont. The fire gutted the interior of the building, and rather than salvaging the exterior, the city took down the walls and erected a new, art deco-style courthouse in its place. The new courthouse was completed in 1933.

Courthouse burns, 1932. Photo courtesy Carnegie Branch Library for Local History, Boulder, Colorado

When Rodeo Ruled in Boulder

The next year, 1934, Boulder started a tradition that would last for the next half century. Sponsored by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce and the Boulder County Metal Mining Association, the Boulder Pay Dirt Pow Wow began as a way to unite workers and distract them from the Great Depression. The event took place on the former farmland bordered by 28th and 30 streets and Pearl and Mapleton, on a lot that previously hosted a dirt track for racing cars. The first year’s festivities included typical county-fair contests: hog calling, hay pitching, pie eating and rolling-pin throwing. In 1939 event planners added a professional rodeo and dropped some of the other contests. The Pow Wow was held annually until 1979, when the Boulder Pow Wow Association sold the land to the same developer. The rodeo changed its name to Boulder Valley Pow Wow and built a new home on South Boulder Road near Louisville, but the organization couldn’t bounce back after the move, and went into foreclosure in 1984, after 50 years.

Boulder's Pow Wow Rodeo. Photo courtesy University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.

Little “Boulder City” has grown up, to be sure. From provincial mining boomtown to cosmopolitan college town, Boulder has changed dramatically in the past 150 years. But a careful look reveals the past in the modern city, parts of which still feel “small” and “old,” if not nearly so colorful.

Judy Mattivi Morley, a freelance writer, has a Ph.D. in Western American and Urban History from the University of New Mexico. She is a partner in Grasshopper Communications, a consulting firm specializing in historic preservation and real estate development. Her second book, “Historic Preservation and the Imagined West,” was published in 2006.