Broomcorn Express

TODAY’S NEWS
You may have read the news that federal funding will help kick-start Colorado’s Front Range Passenger Rail between Fort Collins and Pueblo, a project that will bring passenger rail service to many towns along the Front Range, including Broomfield.  You may also have seen the periodic references to the long-postponed extension of the RTD B line from Westminster to Broomfield, Boulder, and Longmont.  We know that the renewed interest in passenger rail service as an alternative to expanding road networks is a national trend with distinct motivations and challenges at the local level.

A TRIP IN THE WAYBACK MACHINE
As some of you may remember, in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends cartoon series, there was a recurring segment called “Peabody’s Improbable History,” in which a dog (Mr. Peabody) takes a boy (Sherman) in his time-traveling invention (the Wayback Machine) to meet various historical figures. It would certainly be useful for us local history aficionados to have access to a Wayback Machine today, which could take us back a hundred years to a Broomfield with regular passenger service to Denver via electric trolley on the Denver & Interurban (D&I) Railroad. D&I was a Colorado & Southern Railroad subsidiary and their service operated from 1904 through 1926. You could ride from Platform 11 at the Denver Union terminal to Boulder. Given the D&I Railroad’s track layout, which resembled a diamond in the north and a long-curved segment to the south leading to Denver, it was referred to as the “Kite Line” (or Kite Route). Travel from Denver to Boulder took less than an hour and cost 50 cents, with trolleys running in both directions every hour.  After the first day of service, the Denver Post declared, “Boulder is now a suburb of Denver.” The Colorado Encyclopedia states that the route had about 565,000 riders per year at its peak. On the next page is a D&I trolley at the Westminster Station, circa 1908.

INTERURBAN EXPANSION IN THE EARLY 1900s
There was a proliferation of trolley lines throughout the United States in the early 1900s, following on from multiple demonstration electrified systems exhibited at the World Cotton Centennial in 1885.  A reference in Wikipedia states that by 1895, almost 900 electric street railways had been built in the United States.

The same trend was happening locally in Colorado. Denver had 250 miles of track within the metropolitan area, and interurban extensions to the Golden and Boulder area had an additional 40 miles of track.  According to one article on D&I history, a big driver here was the “phenomenal growth in people, businesses and small communities along the Front Range. Because roads were primitive and few people owned automobiles, any new method of transportation was received with enthusiasm.”  Interurban lines, which were the systems designed to link cities with rural areas, sometimes shared facilities with passenger railroads, as was the case in Broomfield.

END OF THE LINE
Given the rapid expansion of trolley service into rural areas, you might be surprised at their short time in operation, much like that of the stagecoaches before them. By the 1920s, the growth of automobile use had significantly impacted ridership, and by the Great Depression, many of the routes had ceased to operate. A 1920 accident in Globeville with multiple fatalities may have taken the sheen off of local trolley service and impacted the operators’ financial status. The D&I ceased to be profitable in 1923, and the Kite Line service, which was discontinued at the end of 1926, was replaced by a bus service that also failed to be profitable. Local transportation activity became and is still dominated by increasing numbers of single-occupancy vehicles accessing our road infrastructure.

BACK AGAIN
At a December 14, 2023 press conference, Governor Polis said, “The fact is that Coloradans are ready for Front Range rail. I would argue we were ready five or ten years ago, but we’re certainly ready now.” Perhaps it is not so strange that the same populated places that were served by interurban trolleys a hundred years ago are back as part of the route where we might be ten years (or longer) into the future.

Sources:

1. https://www.denverpost.com/2023/12/06/front-range-train-rail-colorado-bipartisan-infrastructure-law/
2. https://broomfield.org/3294/Northwest-Rail
3. This is personal history that I just couldn’t make up.  For more details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Peabody  Would certainly be useful for us to have access to the Wayback Machine to get closure on if Broomfield was named for the broomcorn crop or after James Broomfield.
4.  Some references put the Denver terminus at Denver Tramway’s Interurban Loop at 15th and Arapahoe Streets
5.  Map from the GES Gazette, March 14, 2022.  See  https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
6.  Hard to imagine being able to drive from Denver to Boulder in under an hour today.  Some references state the actual travel time may have been 30 minutes longer.
7. https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/broomfield-depot
8. https://localhistory.boulderlibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora:69759
9. https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
10. Kevin Pharris’s book Riding Denver’s Rails is available from the Broomfield Public Library through the Libby online book reader
11. https://gesgazette.com/2022/03/14/globeville-was-once-a-hub-for-rail-travel/
12. https://www.american-rails.com/clrdointerustre.html

Featured image: Map of the D&I Kite Route

INTRODUCTION
On the southern edge of Broomfield in Westminster, you may have passed signs for Church Ranch Boulevard or Upper Church Ranch Lake. Following the Civil War, stagecoaches passed north and south through our area, heading north to Boulder and beyond, and south to Denver. A stagecoach stop at Church Ranch provides direct evidence that stagecoaches were once common vehicles passing by present-day Broomfield.

THE CHURCH RANCH
The Church Ranch name is derived from George Henry and Sarah Church, who left Iowa by stagecoach in 1861, one month after getting married, and acquired homesteads and leases in the area.¹ In 1863, while George was looking for land to graze cattle, he and his wife stopped at “The Child’s House,” about 12 miles northwest of Denver. Sarah described it as a “wretched dirt-covered log house.”² Naturally, they decided to buy the land, house, barn, and corrals because of the view and the relative isolation of the area rather than for the house itself (perhaps like many others who have come this way since). Within a year, the original house had been replaced by a new two-story house.

CONCORD STAGES USED BY THE OVERLAND MAIL AND EXPRESS COMPANY
Between 1862 and 1870, mass transit heading north from Denver along the Front Range was provided by stagecoaches run by the Overland Mail and Express Company.³ The company used Concord stagecoaches, which were built in New Hampshire. These particular coaches were considered to be a good design for the poor quality of roads in the western United States since they used leather straps to insulate the riders from bumps and instead exposed them to a constant swaying motion while the stagecoach was moving. Mark Twain described riding in one of these coaches like this:

Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description—an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the ‘conductor,’ the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags—for we had three days’ delayed mails with us. … We changed horses every ten miles, all day long, and fairly flew over the hard, level road.⁴

As you can see from the photo above, the passenger area of these stagecoaches didn’t have windows, but it did have leather curtains that could be rolled down if needed. There was a swing station located at Church Ranch (which originally was called Child’s Swing Station), about one day’s travel from Denver. At a swing station, the livestock pulling the stagecoaches was changed out. Coaches left Denver every ten hours every day, regardless of the weather, and did not make overnight stops. The stage stop appears to have been located about three miles south of today’s Broomfield County line.

PRESIDENT GRANT SLEPT HERE—MAYBE
I grew up in northern New Jersey, where most of the houses that had existed in the 1700s made claims about George Washington having slept there—difficult for a casual visitor to sort out which were authentic and which were just folklore. In trying to research this article, I came
across an exciting piece of information about a famous visitor along the stage route in our locale. Here’s what caught my attention on the history blog for Rundus Funeral Home: “In 1868, President Ulysses S. Grant and his daughter, Nellie, spent the night (at Church Ranch) with them on their way to Central City, where
the excited miners laid gold brick for them to walk on in front of the Teller House Hotel.”

We do know that Grant made multiple trips to Colorado and clearly spent time in Denver and Golden both as a visiting Civil War hero and as a president. Unfortunately, I think the sentence is somewhat problematic, and here’s why:

1) U.S. Grant didn’t become president until 1869.
2) Nellie Grant was in England in 1871 and was engaged to be married to an Englishman in 1873—I didn’t find any references for father and daughter traveling together in Colorado.
3) Grant’s visit to Central City was in April 1873.
4) Grant was invited to walk to the Teller Hotel in Central City on a sidewalk covered with silver ingots. The silver path was a political ploy intended to sway him to declare silver as the metal to back up the US currency standard rather than gold, a topic that was hotly debated at the time of his presidency. He avoided the implications of the gesture by walking to a back door of the hotel and avoiding stepping on the silver bars.⁵ It’s still a good story, even if all the facts don’t line up.

THE END OF THE LINE
With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1870s, the Colorado stagecoach business went into a rapid decline. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to think that there was a time when travel across Broomfield meant a stagecoach and not a drive along US 36 by automobile.

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1. Austin Briggs, “Church Ranch was a family home before it was a Westminster development,” The Denver Post, April 27, 2016, https://www.denverpost.com/2014/09/09/church-ranch-was-a-family-home-before-it-was-a-westminster-development/.
2. “Historic Highlights of Broomfield County: George Henry and Sarah Church,” Rundus Funeral Home, October 7, 2022, https://www.rundus.com/about/blog/historic-highlights-of-broomfield-county-george-henry-and-sarah-church/.
3. Doug Conarroe, “The Overland and Denver-to-Cheyenne stagecoach lines utilized major pre-Lafayette transportation
   corridors,” Lafayette History, November 14, 2018, http://www.lafayettehistory.com/the-overland-and-denver-to-cheyenne-stage-lines-were-major-pre-lafayette-transportation-corridors/.
4. “The Concord Coach,” Concord Historical Society, https://concordhistoricalsociety.org/the-concord-coach/.
5. Eric Chinn and Erin Osoverts, “The Teller House Turns 150 Years Old,” Central City Opera, July 13, 2022, https://centralcityopera.org/the-teller-house-turns-150-years-old