Longmont: The Chicago Colony That Built the Front Range
Near Boulder, Colorado
In November of eighteen seventy, a group of prominent men in Chicago incorporated a company with an unusual ambition: they would not simply move west as individuals but would build an entire planned agricultural community together. They called it the Chicago-Colorado Colony, sold memberships to finance it, pooled the money to buy land in Colorado Territory, and moved as a coordinated group.
By eighteen seventy-one, they had selected a site near the confluence of Saint Vrain and Left Hand Creeks on the Front Range, laid out a square mile on a grid, and named their new town Longmont, after the view of Longs Peak dominating the western skyline. The peak stands fourteen thousand two hundred and fifty-nine feet high, one of the most prominent summits in the Rockies, and on a clear morning it fills the horizon from the town's main street.
The colony was built on three principles: thrift, temperance, and the communal management of water. That last item proved most consequential. The colonists built an irrigation system from the beginning, channeling snowmelt from the mountains into a network of ditches that made reliable agriculture possible on the semi-arid plains. Irrigation turned the shortgrass prairie into productive farmland and gave Longmont a stability that purely speculative western towns often lacked.
The arrival of the Great Western Sugar Company in the early nineteen hundreds added industrial scale to the agricultural economy. The company's factory on the east edge of town processed sugar beets grown across the surrounding valley and at its peak produced more than a million pounds of sugar per day. The labor demands of the sugar beet harvest drew immigrant workers from Sweden, Germany, Russia, and Mexico, and their descendants shaped the cultural character of the city.
Longmont today is one of the larger cities on the Colorado Front Range, its population now approaching one hundred thousand, its economy diversified into technology and aerospace. But the irrigation canals still run, and the view of Longs Peak from downtown has not changed since eighteen seventy-one.
