The Broomfield Historical Society strives to enliven Broomfield’s community identity, share Broomfield’s rich history, and support Broomfield’s historic Depot Museum
The Broomcorn Express, Quarterly Publication of the Friends of Broomfield History Vol. 3, No. 3, July–September 2023
Brunner Farmhouse, 2023
The lovely yellow house surrounded by gardens on City open space along the north side of Midway Blvd was moved to that location in 1998. It now sits on land that was once the Kozisek family farm. The Brunner Farmhouse’s original location was on the northwest corner of 120th Avenue and Sheridan Blvd.
Built in 1908 by Fred Berges, the Brunner Farmhouse was later sold in 1919 to his sister Eliza and brother-in-law Albert Brunner, both from Kansas. It was the family home for the 100-acre Brunner farm that grew corn, alfalfa, wheat, barley and oats. They also raised milk cows, chickens and hogs. Irrigation for the farm was provided by a small lake on the property and the Church Ditch. The farm was sold to the city in 1998 for the Broomfield Town Center development (where King Soopers and Home Depot are located). The family donated their lake to the city. We know it today as the Brunner Reservoir. The Brunner House was one of the first buildings in Broomfield to receive historic designation by the Broomfield City and County Historic Preservation Ordinance. Much of the original woodwork remains, having been restored by local craftsmen.
The house is owned by the City and is used today as meeting space for local groups and office space for the local non-profit Broomfield Council for the Arts and Humanities, who manages the building for the city. The beautiful floral gardens surrounding the house are maintained by various Broomfield garden clubs and volunteers. New teaching gardens out back include a garden shed built by BHS students.
To learn more about this house and other Broomfield historic sites, mark your calendars for our second annual Historic Sites Tour scheduled for Saturday, October 7th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This year’s tour will offer some new locations, including sites that have a connection to local indigenous peoples. More details will be available on our website and elsewhere as the date nears.
OVERVIEW If you find yourself driving along North Indiana Street near where it intersects with State Highway 128, looking to the southeast, you’ll see a large man-made lake known as the Great Western Reservoir3 in the foreground and the skyline of Denver in the distance. But unlike the nearby Standley Lake reservoir, there’s no regional park or general access road leading to the Great Western Reservoir,and understanding why requires a bit of digging into our local history.
BEGINNINGS Adolph J. Zang created the Broomfield Reservoir and Ditch Company to fund the creation of the Great Western Reservoir for irrigation water for agricultural purposes. The Zang family had already built up a land holding of over one thousand acres. According to one reference, work on the reservoir began around 1903 and wasn’t completed until 1911, with water to fill it coming from Clear Creek and Coal Creek.
In the archives, we have a map of the original design for the reservoir, created by E.L. Rogers, the project’s engineer. The issue of Colorado water rights was just as important in 1903 as it is today, so part of the permitting process involved understanding where the water to fill the reservoir would come from. A.J. Zang made claim to water from the Big Dry Creek, which he would use to fill the Great Western Reservoir. The State Engineer, L.J. Garpeuter, stated that A.J. Zang’s claim (certificate below) was approved by the State of Colorado before construction started. A certificate from the Broomfield Reservoir and Ditch Company is below.4
Land and water rights allowed Zang to grow essential cash crops for beer production, such as wheat, oats, and barley, which added to the family’s wealth.
THE TURNPIKE LAND COMPANY ACQUIRES ZANG’S RANCH In the 1950s, the Turnpike Land Company started to market Broomfield Heights as a planned subdivision. The Company itself was a privately held corporation that was run by handful of stockholders with a strong vision to transform farmland into a city. In 1955, they bought what had been the Zang’s Ranch. That acquisition allowed the Great Western Reservoir to become a reliable source of water for the expanding town, with the construction of a water main to a new treatment plant. The view was that the development now had “a reservoir big enough for a population of 30,500 for a year and a half if never a drop was added.”6 Having access to water was so important that tours were arranged for Denver-based relators, which included a stop at the reservoir.7
Starting in 1963, the Broomfield Heights Mutual Service Association was selling water from Great Western Reservoir to the city.8 By 1971, expanding Broomfield was getting its water supply from both the Great Western Reservoir and Denver Water.
CONTAMINATION OF GREAT WESTERN RESERVOIR Rocky Flats is immediately West of the Great Western Reservoir. From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats was home to a factory producing components for nuclear weapons. In 1970, the EPA tested water in Walnut Creek, which both feeds the reservoir and drains out from it, and detected plutonium in the water,contaminated by leakage from Rocky Flats. The EPA found 40 times normal levels of plutonium in the layers of mud at the bottom of the reservoir in 1973.9 With a half-life of 24,000 years, plutonium-239 is potentially cancer-inducing if inhaled in sufficient quantities, so contamination of the city’s primary water supply was understood to be a potentially serious public health hazard. The map above, redrawn from earlier Department of Energy Data,10 shows a plume of plutonium contamination originating at Rocky Flats.
On June 6, 1989, the FBI and the EPA raided the Rocky Flats plant to collect data on potential violations of environmental law based on multiple serious incidents related to the release of radioactive plutonium and tritium, and agents stayed on site through June 26. Consequently, Broomfield immediately switched sourcing drinking water to Denver Water. Local citizens dug a ditch to divert water from Walnut Creek around Great Western Reservoir.13 Ultimately, a DOE grant and sale of Broomfield’s Clear Creek water rights funded the 1991 Great Western Reservoir Replacement Project to build a new Broomfield drinking water infrastructure, including water rights, a new water treatment facility, and a pipeline to bring water to the facility. The 1991 Replacement Project also expanded the secondary water supply through a contract with Denver Water. Interestingly, that agreement was opposed by local environmental groups fearing that water availability in Broomfield would accelerate a mass urbanization mess.14 By 2004, the Great Western Reservoir had been relegated to being a component of the water reuse system that provides non-potable water for irrigation purposes in Broomfield.
CURRENT EVENTS The current state of Great Western Reservoir is a legacy of an earlier time in Broomfield that is associated with atomic weapons production. Clearly, a short trip to the west side of Broomfield provides a highly visible local artifact of history that is more powerful than just a stock certificate or an old picture. While researching this topic, I didn’t expect to find a Denver Post article dealing with local advocacy groups suing multiple federal agencies to halt work on a trail through the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge—through what they still considered the most plutonium-contaminated part of the area.15 Before that, the Jefferson Parkway project was supposed to provide a segment of a beltway circling Denver—until Broomfield withdrew its support, at least in part because of concerns stemming from a high Plutonium sample reading in 2019 on the east side of the Rocky Flats reserve.16
On a more mundane level, the open space surrounding the Great Western Reservoir has been the subject of multiple news articles in recent years because of bubonic plague infections among the local prairie dog population.17 There is an obvious need to let people know about these outbreaks, which could spill over into surrounding areas; still, it is interesting to read about the plague closing this area of open space that is normally not open to the public.
BIGGER TRENDS Great Western Reservoir can be seen as part of the wider Front Range story of needing to secure water rights and create a delivery infrastructure to support further development. Obviously, there was urgency and necessity to deliver the Great Western Reservoir Replacement project in 1991, but the timing was also good because at that point, there was less development in the region. Consider that Thornton has water rights from the Cache la Poudre River and cannot get approvals to build a pipeline to access that water from neighboring counties—another example of development occurring where there isn’t water, and creating jurisdictional clashes and elevating environmental concerns.18
Clearly, concerns about water access and environmental pollution are not confined to Broomfield’s local history and the past but continue to be current issues here and in surrounding areas.
SUMMARY The history of the Great Western Reservoir in some ways reflects the history of Broomfield itself, moving from a sparsely populated agricultural area and transforming into a suburban community with new requirements and challenges, including the need to deal with the longer-term effects of surrounding developments. We also know that even after remediating once highly polluted areas and converting them to a wildlife refuge or open space, there is still ambiguity about safety and appropriate new uses for those areas.
1. “Requiem for a Nun,” Wikipedia, Last modified January 22, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Nun.
2. Sierra Guardiola, “50 Quotes about Time Passing,” Southern Living, October 5, 2023, https://www.southernliving.com/culture/quotes-about-time-passing.
3. See image above from MAPS.APPLE.COM. “Map of Great Western Reservoir,” Accessed January 24, 2024, https://maps.apple.com/?ll=39.899295,-105.153834&q=Broomfield — Broomfield County&spn=0.015976,0.036364&t=h
4. “The Broomfield Reservoir and Ditch Company stock certificate for A.J. Zang,” Broomfield History Collections, March 25, 1921, https://hub.catalogit.app/9352/folder/entry/0ced3f60-473f-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01.
5. “Map of the Great Western Reservoir,” Broomfield History Collections, 1904, https://hub.catalogit.app/9352/folder/entry/1c09b440-1b6c-11ee-94f2-2d7caf581c4c.
6. Advertisement quote from The Broomfield Builder, a publication of the Turnpike Land Company, https://hub.catalogit.app/9352/folder/a5ef4790-48a1-11ed-9b74-fb65c00c73a7/entry/272d1b10-48a3-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01.
7. “Great Western Reservoir,” c. 1956, Broomfield History Collections, https://hub.catalogit.app/9352/folder/entry/26dd7470-48a3-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01.
8. “Broomfield Water Resources,” Broomfield.org, August 2011, https://www.broomfield.org/DocumentCenter/View/7968/Water-resources-update-2011.
9. Bill Richards, “Plutonium Taints Their Reservoir.” Washington Post, March 21, 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/03/21/plutonium-taints-their-reservoir/df5da12e-06b0-4171-883c-bba20f14f46d/.
10. Jessica Peakes, submitted as a final project for GEOG 3053, University of Colorado, Boulder, “A Geographical Study of Rocky Flats and Surrounding Areas,” ArcGIS StoryMaps, December 11, 2021, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/773c125c28454013972812b65454a7c2.
11. Patricia Buffer, “Rocky Flats History,” Energy.gov, July 2003, https://www.energy.gov/lm/articles/rocky-flats-site-colorado-history-documents.
12. Richards, “Plutonium Taints Their Reservoir.”
13. Silvia Pettem, Broomfield: Changes through Time, paperback, 1st ed. (Book Lode, 2001),190.
14. Pettem, Broomfield: Changes through Time, 87.
15. Katie Langford. “Colorado Environmental Groups File Federal Lawsuit to Halt Rocky Flats Trail.” The Denver Post, January 8, 2024, https://www.denverpost.com/2024/01/08/rocky-flats-lawsuit-colorado-physicians-social-responsibility-plutonium/.
16. John Aguilar, “Arvada, Jefferson County Sue Broomfield over Beleaguered Jefferson Parkway Project,” The Denver Post, June 6, 2022, https://www.denverpost.com/2022/06/06/jefferson-parkway-lawsuit-arvada-jefferson-county-broomfield/.
17. Breanna Sneeringer, “Plague Closes Open Space until Further Notice in Colorado,” OutThere Colorado, July 13, 2020, https://denvergazette.com/outtherecolorado/news/plague-closes-open-space-until-further-notice-in-colorado/article_aad4b47b-9657-5ecc-b3d6-fa78e7c58051.html.
18. Michael Booth. “Thornton Has Plenty of Water — It’s Just in the Wrong Place. And That’s a Very Colorado Story,” The Colorado Sun, September 6, 2023, https://coloradosun.com/2022/12/04/thornton-water-rights-pipeline-larimer-county/.
19. Heidi Beedle, “The Nuclear Legacy of Rocky Flats: Health, Contamination Concerns Linger,” Colorado Times Recorder, April 24, 2023, https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2023/04/the-nuclear-legacy-of-rocky-flats-health-contamination-concerns-linger/53105/.
20. Rob Harris, “Hundreds of Homeowners Sue Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport Alleging Harm to Property Values.” Denver 7 Colorado News (KMGH), December 28, 2023, https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/hundreds-of-homeowners-sue-rocky-mountain-metropolitan-airport-alleging-harm-to-property-values#:~:text=BROOMFIELD,%20Colo.,have%20hurt%20their%20property%20values.
21. On the internet you can find pictures of people who say they have caught fish in The Great Western Reservoir. If this is accurate, the activity seems problematic on several levels. For an example see Fishbrain: “Fishing Reports, Best Baits and Forecast for Fishing in Great Western Reservoir,” https://fishbrain.com/fishing-waters/_8f-2t8I/great-western-reservoir.
22. “Myths and Misunderstandings [about Rocky Flats]” Colorado Department of Health and Environment, March 18, 2019, https://cdphe.colorado.gov/hm/rocky-flats-faq > Myths and misunderstandings (FAQ item).
