Broomfield History

Early landline telephone service in the Broomfield area was dominated by party lines. A party line was shared by multiple customers and was charged at a lower cost rate. You didn’t know until you picked up the handset if the line was already in use; if it was, etiquette required you to put the handset down and try again later. (Of course, many people couldn’t resist the urge to listen in.) Some of us may fondly recall this example of rural communications.

In his oral history interview, Del Morr says, “We had a tiny little post office down on the highway where everybody went to get their mail, and the postmaster and his wife held forth there. And they would call you on your ten-party phone line, and say, ‘Oh, you have a package. Looks like it’s interesting.’”

On the other hand, you also had the human-assisted version of cell phone call routing.  Del says, “And the two charming people were the telephone operators. Dr. Brunner’s wife Carrie and . . . Jessie Kozisek, the daughter of grandma Kozisek, were telephone operators. And they always seemed to know wherever you were in town. And if you got a phone call, they’d call you at that person’s house and say, “I have a phone call for you.”

Photo: Early telephone office, including Edna Maines, Bev Hansen, Opal Gambel, and Jessie Kozisek. Edna Maines lived in the brick building at 120th and Lowell where the switchboard was located. https://hub.catalogit.app/broomfield-history-collections/folder/photographs/entry/46a040d0-48a3-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into Broomfield history!

In early 1952, a turnpike linking Denver and Boulder, with an interchange in Broomfield, celebrated its grand opening. Colorado Governor Daniel I.J. Thornton proclaimed, “This turnpike will become famous as one of the most scenic drives in the nation.” Today, we know this turnpike as Highway 36.

Since there weren’t many jobs in Broomfield at the time, most people commuted to work using the new turnpike. When cars passed through Broomfield, they had to stop at a little house beside the road and pay a man inside: 15 cents to drive from Boulder to Broomfield or 25 cents to from Boulder to Denver. At that time there were no credit cards or express tolls — motorists paid their tolls with coins, and at the end of every day, a lot of money had been collected.

In her oral history interview, Lucille Barnett, former bank worker, says,

Every morning a state patrol would bring over 3000 quarters from the turnpike, and I had to count them. Most of them they had been wrapped. And some of them they didn’t, so I had to count them. Even wrapped, that was quite a few. I counted them by hand. Three thousand, that — well, in rolls it wasn’t that bad. But we had a cart that I put them on and counted them, and put them in our vault. And then once a week, we would have to ship them downtown to the main bank because we couldn’t use that many quarters.

We hope you enjoyed this glimpse into Broomfield history!