Gail Eilas

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The Broomcorn Express, Quarterly Publication of the Broomfield Historical Society
Vol. 4, No. 4, Oct–Dec 2024

By Gail Elias, Broomfield Genealogy Society

On April 6, 2024, Broomfield (and much of the Front Range) was treated to 100 mph winds. On March 13, Broomfield got 14-22 inches of snow. Not news to us today—and not news to anyone who was living in what became the City and County of Broomfield a hundred years ago. In 1915, fourteen electric poles blew over between Broomfield and Westminster.¹ In April of 1920, as described in the adjacent article, Joe Bonnell had quite an experience trying to walk from Broomfield to Lafayette.² Joe’s experience was topped by the 1,800 Boulder-Denver autos who ran into trouble in July 1920 in two predictable trouble spots—Zang Hill (near the Depot) and Goodhue Hill (just north of Miramonte Boulevard—which wasn’t there yet).

Today, we have snow tires (studded or not) and chains. Tires today are typically about 8” wide; in the early 1900’s tires were about 3” wide³—the same size as today’s e-bike tires. Snow tires weren’t invented until 1934.⁴ While the snowplow was invented in 1913,⁵ it was designed for city—particularly New York City—use. Travel was a different experience—and that doesn’t even take into account the roads. 

The Movement to Pave Roads

Something we might take for granted is the concept that roads are paved. The first road in the US was paved with asphalt in 1870—and it was in Newark, NJ.⁶ In 1915, the Colorado Department of Transportation reported that 196 miles of the 5,844 miles in the state system were paved.⁷ None of them appear to have been in Broomfield. 

In 1912, an Indiana entrepreneur had the idea to build a paved highway from Times Square in NYC to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.⁸ The next year, when the Lincoln Highway was officially proclaimed, it included a loop through Colorado. The “Loop” left the main highway at Big Springs NE, with a diagonal to Denver and then straight north to Cheyenne WY. Today Highways I-76 and I-25 parallel the suggested route. It was included (allegedly) because Colorado had protested the decision to go straight across Wyoming after Colorado had supported the Hoosier tour.⁹ The Lincoln Highway Association “dropped” the Colorado Loop in 1915, but Colorado didn’t stop promoting the Colorado Loop. This was only the first of considerable “wheeling and dealing” around the Lincoln Highway.¹⁰

The only problem for Colorado was that none of these roads were paved and at least one, Highway 287, did not exist. In October 1913, State Primary Road No 2 was designated the Lincoln Highway and was marked with broad red, white and blue stripes. This highway ran (mostly) straight south from Longmont to Lafayette and then straight south to Broomfield. The Boulder Commissioners planned to gravel (not pave) this road in the spring.¹¹ 

Navigating the gravel road appears to have been challenging at times—and the Historic Newspapers Collection includes numerous incidents of “people driving badly.” Clearly, that hasn’t changed. One more thing that hasn’t changed—the political fall-out. In January 1919, Boulder County Commissioner, S.A. Greenwood, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Camera complaining that “not all gravel is alike.” He noted that the stretch of road that Boulder had paved with gravel frequently experienced high winds—and the gravel simply blew away —and it wasn’t really gravel, just common dirt. This stretch was christened “the poorest stretch of road on the Lincoln Highway.”¹²

And there may be some good evidence for that. In June 1921, southbound motorists were advised to avoid the Lincoln Highway and to use the Marshall-Superior-Eversman Road detour. Northbound motorists were advised to go through Louisville—because the bridge over Coal Creek had been seriously damaged—and remember these were wooden bridges.¹³ And all of this after the State Highway Commission (CDOT’s parent) had appropriated $200 per mile to maintain the Lincoln Highway through this area and had acquired a new piece of equipment, a road scraper, to do the work.¹⁴ The following year, plans were made to pave the Lincoln Highway from Denver to the top of Zang Hill—and to address Goodhue Hill and the Railway Crossing as well.¹⁵ And just when you think that things couldn’t get any stranger—and that “politics” had taken a back seat to practicality, I have news for you. But you’ll have to wait for our next quarterly newsletter in August to find out what happened next. 

Endnotes

1. Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection. Rocky Mountain News, Vol 56, Number 362, December 28, 1915.

2. Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection, the Lafayette Leader, Volume XVII, Number 16, April 23, 1920.

3. “Tire Size 101,” Coker Tire, https://www.cokertire.com/tire-size.

4. “Winter Tires,” TireCraft, https://tirecraft.com/resources/winter-tires-invented/. 

5. “Snowplow,” Wikipedia, Rev. 20 August, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowplow. 

6. “The American Roadway,” Gerken Companies, https://gerkencompanies.com/the-american-roadway-history-of-asphalt-pavement-and-our-countrys-highway-infrastructure. 

7. “Historic Timeline,” Colorado Department of Transportation, https://www.codot.gov/about/CDOTHistory/centennial/timeline. 

8. “Lincoln Highway,” Wikipedia, Rev. 10 September, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway. 

9. “Origins of the Lincoln Highway,” A Brief History of the Lincoln Highway, https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/history/.

10. “Route of the Lincoln Highway,” Wikipedia, Rev. 12 September, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Highway.  

11. Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Longmont Ledger, Volume XXXV, Number 8, October 13, 1913.

12. Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Boulder Daily Camera, Volume 28, Number 254, January 31, 1919.

13. Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Boulder Daily Camera, Number 72, June 10, 1921.

14. Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Boulder Daily Camera, Number 297, February 24, 1921.

15. Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, Boulder Daily Camera, Number 285, February 10, 1922

Previously published in the quarterly publication of the Broomfield Genealogy Society.

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The Broomcorn Express, Quarterly Publication of the Broomfield Historical Society
Vol. 4, No. 3, July–September 2024

The question, “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?” took on a whole different meaning in 1915. People were stocking up on booze. In Colorado, January 1, 1916 was the day when booze was officially banned. The decades-old tension between the “saloon supporters” and the “temperance team” finally played out in legislation banning the sale of alcohol. Measure 2, a statewide prohibition referendum, passed on November 3, 1915 with 52% of the vote.¹ 

Colorado was by no means the first state to attempt to regulate the sale of alcohol. Tennessee tried in 1837² and Maine in 1846 (it didn’t last). By the time that the Volstead Act (aka the 18th Amendment) was passed nationally, 33 states had already passed their own version of prohibition.³ The Act passed with all but two states (Connecticut and Rhode Island) ultimately agreeing.⁴ Colorado was 30th to sign on.⁵ While Kansas and Nebraska were “dry” states, our neighbor to the north, Wyoming, was not. What happened next was predictable. 

On June 23, 1916, Lafayette officials arrested two men heading south from Cheyenne with 239 pints of whiskey, a one-gallon jug of whiskey, and two dozen pints of beer.⁶ They were not the first—and they definitely would not be the last.

Things did not improve for the forces of law and order in Broomfield. It appears that bootlegging may have been one of the first “equal opportunity enterprises,” as a Mrs. Smith of Louisville, along with four men and two of her three children, made a trip to Cheyenne. She packed a trunk there, labeled it “necessities,” and had it shipped to a Denver hotel. Smart lady! She sent her accomplices to the hotel to get the trunk, where they were promptly arrested. Unfortunately, they talked, so she was arrested too. 

While Mrs. Smith attempted bootlegging by subterfuge, not all Front Range bootleggers were so subtle. In May 1919, two unsuspecting deputies arrested two men, Louis Leveau and Walter James, in Niwot for possession of 50 pints of whiskey. “Walter” was really “Red” Conley who had a significant bootlegging operation in Denver and Adams County. Earlier that year, in court, Red repented of his bootlegging sins and told a sad story of all the fine cars and fortunes he’d lost. His tale of repentance was well received, and the court released him. Two weeks later, Boulder deputies arrested him as he was trying to “run the blockade.”⁷

Broomfield has a long history of being located along major transportation routes, and clearly, this was attractive to the bootlegging community. In June 1919, authorities were holding a car found abandoned in Broomfield months earlier when the driver escaped police in a chase.⁸ It appears he had good reason to run since he was also on the run from another bootlegging gang, the Lewis Gang. And he’d also escaped from jail in Boulder and was in considerable trouble with Sheriff Buster for that.⁹

Other folks took a different approach to this prolonged “dry spell.” In the spring of 1923, a Broomfield family enterprise was interrupted when Prohibition agents raided their still. Father and son both pled guilty on May 26 and were held on $1,000 bond.¹⁰

“Small potatoes” (not a vodka reference since corn was the ingredient of choice) describes what had just happened a little further up the road in what is now Broomfield! For years, authorities had wondered where all that booze was coming from in the towns of Louisville, Lafayette, Superior, and Boulder— and, yes, what would become the City and County of Broomfield. Just a mile northwest of the Monarch Mine #2 (west of Highway 36 near the Flatirons Crossing Exit), authorities searched the house of a “suspected” bootlegger. There was nothing in the house or barns which he showed them. He even invited them in for dinner. However, when authorities asked to search the outhouse, they were met by, “you can’t search that without a warrant,” and the hidden entry to the bootlegger’s operation and storehouse was found. The cave, 25’ underground, was large enough to hold a wealth of gallon barrels full of mash, 200 pounds of sugar, and a 50-gallon copper still. 

While deputies didn’t want to blast the hen house and pig penimmediately above the cave, they did “borrow” a stick of dynamite from the nearby Monarch coal mine and blew up the entry (well, the entry that they found); it appears that there may have been a back door!¹¹

However well-intentioned the ideals of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were, prohibition was difficult, at best, to enforce,and it had an economic impact of closing businesses that served alcohol. And, thanks to questionable law enforcement practices, many “soft drink” parlors (like one that still stands on Public Road in Lafayette) sold alcohol. And (surprise!) cases of confiscated liquor kept disappearing from police evidence rooms. There is some evidence that prohibition spurred the growth of organized crime families—both in Colorado and nationally.¹²

By the late 1920s, Colorado had had enough, and in 1926, it became the first state to hold a referendum calling for the repeal of the 18th Amendment. Colorado was quickly joined by Arizona, New Mexico, and California as well as most of New England. By 1928, more than 12,000 liquor-violation cases were stuck in the Denver courts.¹³ Something clearly had to give. 

By December 1933, 36 states had voted to ratify the 21st Amendment, repealing prohibition. On the first day that alcohol could be sold (April 7, 1933), the Rocky Mountain News estimated that breweries made $200,000 on opening day. That’s about $4,000,000 in today’s dollars. Breweries that we know today—the Tivoli and Coors—returned as if they’d never left. 

This could not have been an easy transition for east Boulder County, which has a strong (and mixed) history on this topic. Lafayette, under the influence of Mary Miller—a historical figure who was deeply involved in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—had a long history of supporting prohibition. And Louisville had an equally strong history of defying it. But Broomfield has inherited much from these jurisdictions, as well as its neighbors to the south, which generally sided with Denver and opposed prohibition. Thank goodness there was at least some room for differing opinions. 

Perhaps one of the more interesting changes to come from prohibition was the shift from producing beer in kegs (destined for saloons) to producing beer in cans or bottles. Coors had clearly positioned themselves to grab that part of the market. Post prohibition, the “saloon industry” faded as consumption in cans and bottles increased. Until the rise of today’s brewing industry, alcohol sales, particularly beer, focused on portability of their product. Today’s Colorado brewing industry traces its roots to both the “saloon era” and the changed technology which prohibition brought. So, that being said, “Anyone up for a beer?”

Interested in learning more about the impact of prohibition in Colorado? Check out the work of Sam Bock, at History Colorado, https://erstwhileblog.com/2019/02/27/colorado-prohibition-movement/,  and History Colorado’s article at https://www.historycolorado.org/story/2022/08/12/final-round.  

This article was originally published by the Broomfield Genealogy Society in their February 2024 quarterly newsletter.

Endnotes

1. “Prohibition,” Colorado Encyclopedia, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/prohibition.

2. Missy Sullivan, “Tennessee Passes Nation’s First Prohibition Law,” HISTORY, January 26, 2024, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/tennessee-passes-nations-first-prohibition-law.

3. Amanda Onion, “Prohibition: Years, Amendment and Definition,” HISTORY, April 24, 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/prohibition.

4. “The Nation Dries out,” DPLA, https://dp.la/exhibitions/spirits/the-nation-dries-out/18th-amendment.

5. Wikipedia contributors, “Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” Wikipedia, April 17, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution.

6. “Five Bootleggers Arrested,” the Lafayette Leader, Vol. XII, No. 21, June 23, 1916, Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection.

7. “Famous Bootleg Artist in Boulder Prison, Incognito,” Boulder Daily Camera, Vol. 29, No. 61, May 24, 1919, Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection.

8. “Lewis Bootleg Gang had Rich Partners and Arrests of Some of Them are Made,” Boulder Daily Camera, Vol. 29, No. 89, June 26, 1919, Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection.

9. “Walter Woeber Escapes From Lewis Gang; Pleads Guilty to Bootlegging Fined by Ingram,” Boulder Daily Camera, Vol. 29, July 25, 1919, Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection.

10. “Agents Take Father, Son and Still in Raid,” the Rocky Mountain News (Daily), Volume 64, Number 146, May 26, 1923, Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection.

11. Ibid.

12. “Prohibition,” Colorado Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia, “Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

13. Ibid.

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