 Welcome to the Longmont Museum on the Internet. My name is Justin Veatch. I'm the manager of the Museum Steward Auditorium, and we are not coming at you live from the Steward Auditorium this evening. Out of an abundance of caution, we've decided to take everything completely virtual and remote due to recent uptick in COVID cases here in Boulder County. Tonight is being offered as part of our Thursday nights at the Museum Series. In fact, it is the last Thursday night program we'll be offering here in 2020, but don't be, never humine, don't fear, we'll be back in January with more Thursday night programming, and we'll be releasing our full winter spring program shortly. So be on the lookout for that, and if you haven't signed up for our email blast, you can do so on our website. I want to thank all the people who make these programs possible. Our museum members, our museum donors, the Friends of the Longmont Museum, and the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, otherwise known as SCFD. I also want to thank our media sponsor, the Mighty KGNU Community Radio out of Dear Boulder, Colorado, just a bit south of here. Tonight's program is a really exciting one. It's really celebrating the moment we've all been waiting for here in Longmont and all of the various L-Towns around Boulder County. And I'm talking about the publication of Longmont, the first 150 years. It just hit our doorstep here at the museum or over there at the museum this week, and we've already sold, I think, like a hundred copies of this. Tonight we are here for a conversation with the book's author, Eric Mason, the museum's curator of history. A little bit about Eric, and I'm going to read directly from the book flap. And before I do, I should let you know that this book is available for purchase. Whether you're looking for stocking stuff or it would have to be a very large stocking because it's a large, beautiful book or a Christmas present for your family or whatever. I'd say it's a good one and it's gorgeous. It's available via our website, www.longmontmuseum.org, and we are offering curbside pickup. That's right. Anyway, without further ado, let me introduce Eric Mason. He's a native of Boulder, Colorado, who has been fascinated with history since his parents hung a poster of the US presidents over his crib. He received a BA from Colorado College in Colorado Springs and an MA in history museum studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. He has worked at the Longmont Museum for more than 20 years, which is unbelievable because I think he's like 27 and he's currently curator of history, as I mentioned, responsible for preserving the museum's historic object and archival collections, which are large, I might add. Among the exhibitions he has helped to develop are the museum's core installation Front Range Rising and special exhibits such as John Empson, Longmont's robber baron and World War I, Longmont and the Great War. He lives in a 1923 bungalow in downtown Longmont with his two cats, which we may be lucky to catch a glimpse of this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Eric Mason to the internet. Hi, Justin. Hi, Eric, it's good to see you. It's good to see you. Strange not to be on the stage of the Stuart tonight, but we'll make do. Strange times. Yeah, yeah. Will your cats be joining us this evening? I know that they're... We will see, they are cats. They do what they wish. Well, I just wanna say congratulations on a gorgeous book. You must be just thrilled with the outcome. I am. Yeah, yes, it's so great to see it finally in hand after all the work that's gone into it. I am delighted to finally be able to have it out there and have people be able to enjoy it. So how exactly does a guy from Boulder get to be the dude who writes the book on Longmont? How exactly does that happen? Well, in some ways, this book has been 25 years in the making, you know, I've... For 150 years in the making. Well, 150 years, true, true. I've been with the museum since 1996, so getting close to 25 years now and all throughout that time, you know, anytime anyone came in with a research question, you know, all of those little tidbits started to add up. And as really it became clear that there had not been in quite a while a good comprehensive history of Longmont written, it seemed like it was really time for that to happen. And as we developed more and more of our museum's collection and I started to understand that collection better, realized there are just so many resources within the museum's collection that could be tapped to help write this book, that it seemed a natural fit. So at what point did you realize that it really kind of dawn on you that you'd be the guy to do this? So I mean, it's been interesting. There's been a couple of folks that have written or attempted to write books. There's been a few pictorial histories written over the years and you know, I've usually worked with those folks and I've always kind of said, oh, you know, the pictorial histories are nice, but gosh, you really need somebody to do the more detailed, not just the pictures, but the actual history behind it. And I started to realize, well, there's really, probably that's gonna be the museum and most likely I'm the best person in position to do that. So it just kept kind of building up and it really started to snowball a couple of years ago. I have to give a shout out to Kathy Heineken with Barb Wire Books. She actually was the one to email my boss and say, you know, the museum needs to do a history book. It's needed in this community and you're the ones to do it. And that was kind of the trigger that started us off. And they're gonna be selling the heck out of this book as we are doing. I hope we'll have it all around town and up and down the front range. Yeah, yeah. So what sort of challenges did you kind of face in writing the book? Was there, yeah, basically, what were the challenges, if any? So I was really fortunate to be able to take a sabbatical essentially in February of 2019 to just spend dedicated time outlining the book. And so it wasn't really so much the overall arch of long mod history. I was pretty familiar with that. It was kind of the internal structure, getting figuring out when you have history weaving in and out, these threads that come and go throughout time, how you decide when they are separate and you need to just tell one story and tell it to completion and when the story needs to weave through many chapters. So that was one of my first challenges and had some help from our readers. I'll particularly thank Heather Thorwald, former museum staff member who was an early reader of the book and really gave me some great pointers on how to make sure that I wasn't getting too choppy but also was an entertaining read and the stories were carrying through well. So that was probably one of the first challenges that I faced. And early on, I knew it was gonna be a lot of fun just because you're digging into this thing, it's a new project, you've got lots of ideas. I kind of thought, I wonder if it's ever gonna turn into a slog and am I just gonna be like, oh, I've got to write more book today? But that never happened. I just, wow, every time I got an opportunity to work some more on the book, it was fun. I found new things. I, you know, there was a lot of the little details to sort through and one of the great times that I was able to do that was those early months of COVID which was really when I was wrapping up the book and was all the little details of getting the footnotes right and getting the index and all those kind of things done. And to be able to do that in kind of an uninterrupted space, I think, you know, it was a terrible thing to have happened but for me, it turned out to be a really great opportunity to polish the book that I probably wouldn't have had in that kind of dedicated time without that shutdown. I think it was, I think COVID's been good for a lot of creative people in that way. Yeah, it really, I mean, it just, because it's such a complete break with the past, it's kind of an opportunity to just say, okay, we need to rethink everything we're doing or need to just focus on the most important things. And that's, you know, what I've been able to do. Wow, yeah. So no dark nights of the soul where you're tearing your hair out and you're like, my God, I am not even close. There's no way I can pause. I think this is my, this is my anxiety. If I had to write that book, I would have been up at 4.30 in the morning and at Kinko's or something, just like losing my mind. Yeah, I have to say, I'm glad I'm writing it now in the digital word processor era. The idea of typing this out and, you know, oh my God, the footnote went into the next page. Oh, I've got to redo 400 pages, you know. I can't imagine that. That's the beauty of modern technology where you're like, oh, this needs to go in a different place. You can drag it and drop it and there it is and everything magically reformats and there it is. So who did the, was there someone, did you work with a designer on the book? So the book is published by a dawning publishers. They specialize in hardback picture rich histories and they also publish the Longmont album, which the museum did about 25 years ago. And so they were the ones that did the final design, the final editing, the printing, sent them out to the museum and all that. So give them huge props. They were great to work with and particularly a designer, Stephanie Danko, just, you know, it was really fun to be able to work with them. It was really fun to be able to work with a designer and, you know, see kind of what had looked like a manuscript with a bunch of pictures along the side, suddenly turning into, wow, this is like a real book now. And you get that first proof where it's like, oh, wow, you know, yeah, it's got captions and it's got, you know, a text that's flowing correctly and all these things, that was cool. That's when it really started to feel real for me when I saw that first proof a few months back. Well, the result is gorgeous. And I hear that it's currently ranked number one on the Longmont bestseller list. Is that hardback bestseller list? I think certainly for the past week or so, it's been probably outselling of every other, you know, Longmont history book, definitely. You're gonna want to get your hands, ladies and gentlemen, on the hottest book in Longmont right now. I was wondering what the, any sort of big takeaways for you or surprises in writing this book? Now, I think one of the things that I really started to discover as I began to lay out the book, began to think about, okay, what are the big stories that run through it? Is that there are some patterns through Longmont history and one of them that I had kind of known but really hadn't quite understood how much this repeated throughout history was the recurrence of floods in Longmont history. I mean, obviously most of us lived through the flood of 2013, experienced that. For me, that was the first flood I'd experienced in Colorado. And as it turns out, that was just sort of a historical quirk of the next flood before that one happened just a couple of years before I was born in 1969. Longmont just happened to escape that one because they just completed Button Rock Dam and it held back basically, it would have been a very significant flood and filled the dam in three weeks, which they expected would take multiple years to fill. Then before that, there were floods in 1935, 1921, 1894, 1864. So it's easy to forget because we see the St. Rain River and I think this is just a stream, it's hardly anything. And Longmont is in a floodplain and that's something that history has borne out. And then another interesting thing that again, I had kind of known about but really developing this book brought home to me how much, particularly over the last 75 or so years, Longmont has shifted in such a big way from being a small town that had to really struggle to get significant amenities constructed. So for example, the St. Rain Memorial Building, the first modern recreation facility in Longmont, that was a major fundraising effort over multiple years by the community and just a huge process to get that funded. And you compare that to the Longmont Rec Center, which was a bond issue in 1999, it was approved by voters, but there wasn't need to do bake sales and so forth to build the slide for the Longmont Rec Center. And the same thing with Longmont United Hospital when then what was then the new hospital out on Mountain View was built, they actually put themselves over the top in their fundraising efforts by auctioning off a fur coat. It was like the final item to get enough money to actually start it. And there was a lot of federal dollars involved as well. And then over the years since then, now it adds new buildings and it certainly doesn't require that level of fundraising any longer. Do you attribute that to just sheer population expansion? And I think it's population, it's to some extent on a sort of macroeconomic level, the maturing of things like municipal bond markets and so forth, but a lot of it is, yeah, a town of 10,000 has very different level of resources than a town of 100,000 does. So we see the things that don't even really cross our minds as it would be a challenge today, would have been a huge challenge 60 years ago. So that was kind of a surprise. That was something you learned in the process of writing this book that kind of stood out. Yeah, yeah, and just the whole point of, when Longmont as a city government began, they had two staff and basically what they did is they went down the dust on the streets and they had one night watchman to maintain order. And of course, today we have something like 800 or 900 city employees and provide dozens of different services to the community. So all of that is something that has grown over the course of the last 150 years. And I think one of the big takeaways is kind of the resilience of Longmont, right? Over-accounting natural disasters and the Ku Klux Klan and some civil unrest and, you know. Yeah, yeah, certainly. I mean, I wanted to make sure that this book was not a, everything's always been great in Longmont because the reality is we've had some hard times and you mentioned the Ku Klux Klan, that was a really dark time in Longmont and in Colorado history. I mean, I think it's important to recognize that Longmont was not the center of Ku Klux Klan activity in Colorado, although it certainly was, you know, Longmont seems to have been a power in the Klan forces in that time. So, and the Klan was around for quite a long time although they only held power for about four years in Longmont. But yeah, I think that idea that Longmont has had some really significant times. In fact, this was another real surprise to me, probably the thing that I'd never thought about that much until I started doing research. Probably the closest Longmont ever came to really ceasing to exist was very early on in 1873. It was just two years old. The town had actually just gotten itself incorporated, changed over from its founding organization, the Chicago Colorado Colony, just the beginning of 1873. And in April of 1873, the railroad, the Colorado Central Railroad arrived from coming up from Golden and that linked Longmont to markets, you know, all across the country. And of course, linked as well to resources being able to bring in lumber and furniture and so forth on the train. Just a few months after that, a major economic panic hit the panic of 1873. And that lasted about four years before they were able to continue constructing the railroad. So if they hadn't made it to Longmont, Longmont was where the railroad stopped for four years. If they hadn't made it to Longmont, I think it's anybody's guess whether the town would have survived. You know, it was a rough economic time. Certainly other communities didn't make it, but because it had that railroad link, it was able to get its goods out and was able to survive. And then once the railroad continued to build and linked up with other railroads and they added additional lines over the coming years, really Longmont became an important agricultural hub for a lot of different industries. And we should all remember that when we're stuck waiting for the train on Ken Pratt or Main Street. Yep, the railroad follows exactly the same path as it did in 1873. So... You're shaking your fist at that train. Remember that we wouldn't be here then. All right. Is there a section of the book that you're, or a story that come from the book that is particularly, that's your favorite? Or is there a favorite section or something? Oh, you know, it's kind of like asking, you know, what's your favorite child? It's, you know, there's so many... Or cat. Or cat, yes. Oh, that's usually the cat that's, you know, not currently sick. So, you know, but yeah, I mean, I think probably the colony era, the colony story, the idea that Longmont begins as this unusual gathering of idealists who decide rather than using a traditional, you stake out a town or you go to Russia town kind of thing that it was a really planned community that they sent out people from Chicago to choose the site of the town. It wasn't just, here's a good spot. We're gonna found a town here. They were very deliberate about all of that. And because it's also quite well documented, particularly we have several different sets of letters. We have the letters of the early colony president, Seth Terry from whom Terry Street is named as well as correspondence with George Bowen for whom Bowen Street was named. He never ended up moving to Longmont but was a significant power in Chicago and then the colony back there. So we have this great documentation and it gives us some personalities. And one of the things that I was not able to include as much as I would have liked was the story of a man named William Holly who was an early figure within the colony movement but who clearly felt he was far more important than much of anybody else in the colony seems to have thought of him as. He's constantly writing his patron was George Bowen and he would write back to George Bowen about, oh yes, I've purchased this tent and it's going to be called Bowen Hall and it will be the forever remembered hall within Longmont history. And as far as I know, I think I actually mentioned it in my book but I think I'm the first Longmont history book that mentions Bowen Hall. It really did not, much of what he thought and much of what he felt like he was doing did not end up being that significant to Longmont history. And sadly enough, and we don't really know why but ultimately the colonists on the ground here actually petitioned to have him removed. He was acting as their agent in Denver and they got so fed up with him that they petitioned to have him removed from being an officer within the colony. So there's these interesting stories and another fascinating person that I really would love to do more on is Elizabeth Thompson. Thompson Park is named for her and she was a philanthropist out of both Vermont and New York City, split her time between them and was extremely involved in a lot of progressive causes and I've actually found out since really completing the book that she actually corresponded with Frederick Douglass. The papers of Frederick Douglass are actually going to feature a couple of her letters with, between Elizabeth Thompson and Frederick Douglass. So fascinating woman, she again did not live in Longmont but she did visit here in 1871 and she not only supported the colony by providing money for memberships for people that could not afford it. Membership in the colony was $155 which was a couple of months salary for a skilled tradesperson at that time. So a significant amount of money but she funded a number of people that she felt like needed a new start in the West. So, all of these interesting characters in the colony story and I think there's probably another book in that whole story. So you think, so we haven't seen the last of you in terms of your authorship. We will see, we will see but I certainly would be up for writing another book things work out. I think we may need one after this. Let's talk about the photos, shall we? I mean, how did you decide on the cover photo? All right, well, let me go ahead and I'll share some photos here. Fantastic. All right, so this is the cover photo and this one is by a local photographer of contemporary photographs by C. Nathan Pully and he was very involved in a campaign called You Belong in Longmont a few years ago and took a lot of photographs around Longmont and what struck me about this one. It's interesting, Longmont is named for Long's Peak but it's actually kind of hard to get a good photo of Long's Peak. It really shows Longmont. It's actually one of the things I think the colony founders missed an opportunity. If you're in Colorado Springs, you know that Pike's Peak Avenue points straight at Pike's Peak and Longmont Long's Peak Avenue does not. So I think they missed an opportunity there but this was a great photo I thought that did show Long's Peak as the history of the sugar factory. So really illustrates a lot of different eras in Longmont history. Were there any other photos that were kind of vying for the cover or was just like, this is it? One of the things we definitely wanted with the cover photo was a color photo and so I did look at some historic color photos but ultimately I thought it was really important to show that this is a book that does bring us up to the present day. It doesn't just stop in 1920 or something. So I like this more contemporary looking photo. And the old sugar mill is totally appropriate to have in the shot. Let's take a look at another, one of my favorite photos from the book. This is actually an illustration. The first real view we have of Longmont was done in 1873 by a fairly well known artist that was traveling around Colorado named A.E. Matthews. He did a number of these sketches of communities up and down the front range. And he takes a fairly fanciful look at Long's Peak which is kind of visible in the background here. Tower is a little higher than it really does in the foothills but you can see just how small Longmont is at this point, really a scattering of houses. And he's also put in here a train coming in that's actually not really where the train was but I think he knew it was important for Longmont to note that the train was coming at that point. So this is just I think a fascinating photo, a fascinating illustration of one of the earliest views we have of Longmont at that time. And then this one is taken in the early 1880s and I think this is an example of really the resiliency of Longmont. So this is the 300 block of Main Street to kind of orient you. This is the Dickens Opera House which is at 300 Main and we have this whole series of brick buildings all along this side of the street on the left side. And all of these are basically new within just the last couple of years because this was the portion of Longmont that burned in a fire in 1879. And it was kind of a catalyst to realizing that if this was gonna be a community that was gonna last they needed to think about building their buildings out of more durable materials. The first buildings in the early colony were all out of wood and so they were destroyed in that fire in 1879 on the left side of the street. And then on the right side they survived the fire but city council passed an ordinance that said all future construction should be out of brick. And so we see even by the 1880s most of the wooden buildings on both sides of Main and the 300 block have been replaced with brick. But I also love this photo just because it just has so many interesting little details in it. So you have this boot that's out on a pole that's almost certainly a sign. Not everyone at that time probably could read and could read a sign that says, oh, you know, that's a shoe shop but they could see that no, that's a boot. Okay, that's probably where I can go and get my shoes. And then this blur here which shows you the long exposures they needed to do is almost certainly a dog and doing what dogs usually do to fire hydrants. So it's just a fascinating photo capturing that moment in Longmont history. Some of the buildings that were there on Main Street were actually relocated, right? And they're still standing, is that true? Yes, yes. At least one of the ones on the west side of Main Street with the old Emerson and Buckingham Bank was actually moved onto 3rd Avenue and is today a house. And you would never guess today that it hadn't been a house all of its life. And it was built, when it was originally built it did look fairly domestic. I think the builder probably knew more about house construction than commercial architecture but they had to build it quickly because the safe for the bank was delivered before the building was ready. So actually for a while they just parked the safe in the middle of the street because it had taken a six mule team to bring it over from Greeley. And I guess they decided the odds of another six mule team stopping by with the ability to move the safe was pretty small. So they did banking out of the middle of the street in Longmont for a little while until the bank building was ready. And within, by the 1880s they had a beautiful stone bank building and they had replaced that first wooden building. And so they moved that building and that was not atypical to move buildings at that time particularly in the era before overhead power and communication lines made moving buildings considerably bigger challenge than it had been before that. Do you know how I knew about that move? I do not. Because I went on one of your historic walking tours and learned it. Oh, very good. Yes, yes indeed. We do go by the old Emerson Buckingham Bank on our third avenue walking tour. If you haven't been on one of those you need to sign up next time we have. Yes, we will have them again in the spring. And hopefully by then maybe we'll be able to be a little bit more open in the number of folks we can have. We've been pretty limited given the current restrictions but I know they are always popular. We'll go ahead and head to our next photo which is I think a real classic. One of Longmont's big events in the late 1890s and early 1900s was Pumpkin Pie Day. In addition to Pumpkin Pie they served coffee and you get a sense they had some pretty serious coffee. In fact, a pretty well-known author, Damon Runyon was a reporter with the Rocky Mountain News and came up to cover Pumpkin Pie Day. And he talks about, yeah, they served coffee from a urn the size of a railroad water tank. And I think this was the exact urn he was talking about. But they estimated maybe as many as 10,000 people in the light have come to Longmont for Pumpkin Pie Day. And I also wanna give a shout out on this photo to one of our museum volunteers, Catherine Scott. The original of this photo has been damaged and is actually in several pieces. And so it was really kind of hard to see quite the image and she was able, you know, with the miracle of Photoshop to knit everything together and make it into one seamless composition. So you really get this impact of this gigantic coffee urn and the size of the dippers too. It's like, man, I assume those were not cups of coffee that they were serving out of those dippers because, you know, you'd be wired for a week or so if you drank that much coffee. I think we need to bring that back. The coffee urn and Pumpkin Pie Day, cause I'm all for it. Yeah, yeah, the urn would be a great addition to the St. Rain Historical Society's Pumpkin Pie Day. Their coffee, I think pots are a little bit smaller these days. So next photo really gets into one of the real significant turning points in Longmont history and one that brought a wide variety of people from all around the world to Longmont. And that was the arrival of the sugar beet industry. 1903, the Longmont Sugar Factory was built. A couple of years later, it became part of Great Western Sugar and it meant that farmers were growing sugar beets all throughout this area to serve the factory. And this is a young woman named Emma Swazo. I actually had the pleasure of meeting Emma Swazo before she passed away some years ago. She and her family had come up from New Mexico. They heard there was opportunity in Longmont working in the beet fields. And you can see that she is holding a shorthandled hoe. This was a tool that eventually was banned because it was considered so abusive because it required you to work on hands and knees. You couldn't stand up to work in the beet fields if you were using one of those shorthandled hoes. But beets were a very labor intensive crop and so they drew people from really all around the world to come to Longmont. We had Latinx people coming from Texas and New Mexico and Mexico itself. We had German Russians, people who were ethnically German but had been living in Russia coming to this area. We had Scandinavian groups. We had Japanese Americans all coming into this area drawn by the need for work in the agricultural fields. And so it's really an important part of our story and an important source of the diversity that we see in Longmont today. Another of my favorite photos, both just because I think it tells a great story and because how we acquired it is a wonderful story. So in 1937, this woman, Genevieve Johnson was very upset at her ex-husband Ralph. He was not paying his alimony and there wasn't a lot of recourse. She didn't have any children. So there wasn't at that time a lot of opportunity in the courts to enforce an alimony settlement. And so she decided to gain attention. She would do a sit-down strike. And so she got a rocking chair and she sat in front of the house where he was living. And for some reason, I think because it was the depression and people were just looking for any kind of distraction. This became national news. There were newsreels about it. And in this photo, we see, you know, people were bringing her all kinds of things, blankets and food and all this. And in this photo, we have the Longmont Elks Cowboy Band serenading her as she sits in front of her ex-husband's house in 1937. And we'd found out about this story actually because we have a button. There was a company out of St. Louis that made buttons in honor of her sit-down strike for alimony. And we have one of those in the collection. And so I go, why in the store? It's a sit-down strike for alimony. So dug into the story a little bit more. And I really wanted to use it in the book, but I didn't have a good photo of her. I was planning on using just a scan from a newspaper and it was not the best quality. And literally the book was in proof stages when a lovely couple, Kathy and Irv Rel, came to the museum with a collection from their friend, their late friend Peggy Carroll. And Peggy Carroll had lived in Longmont as a young woman as had her parents and her father is actually in the Elks Cowboy Band picture. And it was, we're going through the pictures of that they were proposing to donate. I came across this one and I gasped audibly because it was, this is the sit-down striker. This is the photo I have needed to really tell this story. And I was just so delighted to be able to slip it in under the wire and send it to the designer as she was finalizing the book. And so I just, I love the photo. I think it's a fun photo. You can tell she's just soaking in the attention and it just tells such a wonderful story of Longmont history. Did she ever get the alimony? That's a sad thing. And this is, you know, something, maybe somebody out there watching knows the rest of the story because in the newspaper, ultimately after 17 days, they were getting thousands of people driving by wishing her well or hurling abuse. Unfortunately, both of those things are nothing new. After 17 days, they finally call to halt the chief of police actually arrested her for causing a public nuisance. But he also charged her husband with non-payment. The two sides we see in the paper are suing and countersuing. And the story just kind of fades out of the headlines. And sadly, I was never able to track down what happened. Both she and her ex-husband leave Longmont not too long after this from what I can tell. So I never really find out what the story is, but hopefully maybe somebody will know the rest of the story and can fill that in for posterity. Stunning photo. So the next photo I'd like to highlight is one that I'd include it in the book because I liked it. It's an aerial photo from about 1950, but it wasn't really until, again, I was looking at the proofs where the designer had actually zoomed in kind of on this section. This is a detail from a larger photo that showed all of Longmont. And I started to notice just some wonderful little details. And that's again, we're having this photo and this one is really taking up a good portion of a page within the book. And so you see these cool little details like there's a box car parked on a railroad siding right here. And there's these billboards. You can just see the back of them that face third Avenue, couple of different ones is in here. And just lots of little details in other one right here billboard that makes you realize, you know, Main Street was one of the major highways, North-South highways running up to Wyoming at that time. And so just a great capture of what Longmont looked like in about 1950 still feels very much like a small town at that point. And then another photo, and this one really illustrates a collection that I think was also one of the real triggers for being able to write this book. So in 2015, the museum became the repository for the Longmont Times Calls photograph collection. And the museum's collection is really strong in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and then less so as we get into the 1950s, 60s, 70s and then starts to pick up again in the 90s and 2000s. But there was a big gap in our collection and as it happens the Times Call collection neatly filled that gap. And so this is a really striking photo of one of the great tragedies in Longmont history, the crash of the United Airlines mainliner Denver airplane which was at Highway 66 in Weld County Road 11. So somewhat east of Longmont, in fact today it'd be a little bit east of I-25, but the plane was actually brought down by a bomb. It was an insurance scam and it had taken off from Stapleton Airport a few minutes earlier and crashed in a farm field east of Longmont. And it was Longmont people that were rushing out there both to try and help and in some cases just out of curiosity, they ultimately had to bring out the National Guard to kind of bring the scene under control. And you can kind of see just, we've got all kinds of people just sort of milling around the crash site in this. And this was a photograph that a few years ago a book was actually written specifically on this crash. And at that time, we didn't have any photos of the crash in our collection. It wasn't really until the Times Call collection that we were able to actually feature a true photograph in the book. So really a great, great resource that we've been able to add. And then this book also allowed us to include some color photos. There's a couple of sections of color photos within the book. And this is a building that people who were in Longmont in the late 1980s, early 90s, remember with either fondness or despite depending on your perspective. But this was called Cheaper Charlie's Shed and it was a very much loved and hated landmark at Ninth and Hoover in Longmont. And it was painted and repainted in these messages. And then I think this photo really captures, was not so much graffiti as just messages to the community. And all of these are really positive messages that the sign of the building would show again and again. And so when we had the opportunity to do color, this was one I thought, oh yeah, we've got to show Cheaper Charlie's in full color. The building was torn down in 1990. And it's kind of a sad thing in some ways. It was really a community center in some interesting ways that actually the land was vacant until just a few years ago. But definitely an important part of Longmont history. We, the museum managed to salvage a section of it and has it on display. So it's actually a recreation. Oh, was it a recreation? In our front-rangerizing exhibit, the number of layers of paint and the amount of lead paint that was used in creating the original shed made displaying an actual piece kind of a hazard. But so we created a replica that in pre-COVID times, you could actually write your own message on that period after we clean off. And we'll have that again one of these years. Yep, classic Longmont landmarks. And this photo, which I think is our final set of photos from the book really illustrates how history does repeat itself. So we have on the left, the 1894 flood taken from 1st and Main, see the railroad tracks and the floodwaters really washing across what was then basically an empty valley south of Longmont proper, Longmont ended at 1st Avenue. And then by 2013, essentially that same almost exact spot, we have a photo taken, but by then unfortunately, Longmont had spread throughout the flood plain. And so that's why we saw really so much more damage in 2013 than in the earlier floods because Longmont had built across the flood plain. And that's why now you see so much work going on and we'll continue for a number of years to re-channel the river to hopefully prevent the river from jumping out of its banks and future floods. So I hope you've enjoyed a little bit of a few photos from the book. There's almost 300 in the book. So a lot of other opportunities to take a look at photos from throughout Longmont history. We'll all go ahead and stop sharing now. And maybe if there are any photos on any questions on Facebook or anyone that any other questions from you, Justin, I'm happy to answer them. Well, I wanna encourage everyone out there in Facebook land to ask us questions in the comments. There are a few questions here. Let me just scroll through here. There's Clara is wondering if there's a section in the book about the museum's phenomenal effort around De De Los Muertos and our annual exhibitions. Is there any talk of De De Los Muertos? I think one of the hardest things obviously in writing a book like this is all of the things that you're not able to fit in. And I decided, even though I'm writing for the museum, it seemed a little unfair to really feature a lot about the museum itself. And maybe again, there's another book about kind of the museum and some of the things that it's done over the years. So I mentioned it briefly in terms of some of the new building that went up, but wasn't able to get into De De Los Muertos particularly. But yeah, there's just so many stories that could have filled another two or three books that wasn't able to include. I did notice that the chapter on the auditorium and its manager didn't make it either. Well, that itself is obviously a multi-volume work. Yeah, that's what I think. Okay, but lots of congratulations. Nancy says, congratulations, Eric, looking forward to buying the book. She used to work at the front desk. This is Nancy in Berghia or in Berghia. Yes, yes. Good to hear from you, Nancy. She said, people were always asking for a book when they came by the front desk. You're filling the void. Laura, congratulations from the St. Vrain Historical Society. People love the sit-down strike story. They're looking forward to getting the book. They wanna know if there are any autographed copies available. Oh, yes, yes. We do have autographed copies available at the museum, and we can also, if somebody wants a particular dedication or something, I'm glad to do that. We can arrange that as well. And hopefully there will come a time when we're not so having to be socially distant where we could do an in-person book signing or something since next year is Longmont's 150th anniversary and that the celebration will go on all year. I hope there'll be a point where we can really have a good book signing on this book. Claire is asking a follow-up question about the inclusion of the Latinx community in the book. Yeah, very important. Very key part of Longmont history and part that I really wanted to make sure and feature a number of stories from. So we talk about a number of different Latinx individuals within Longmont. Benjamin Rodriguez, the first Longmont City Council member is an important story and just individuals that perhaps haven't gotten a lot of attention. We have a story of Ramolo Martinez, and Ramolo Martinez was instrumental in getting the white trade only signs taken down on Main Street. So in the 20s, 30s, some of that clan influence and even up into the 40s and 50s, there were a number of businesses on Main Street that had white trade only signs. And Ramolo Martinez and the Spanish-American club that he was a member of approached those businesses and he said, we are members of this community. These signs make us feel like dogs and the signs came down. It took efforts to the Spanish-American club. It took veterans, Latinx veterans coming back from World War II. There's a story of a man in uniform, a Latinx man in uniform who was not served and made quite a fuss and the restaurant owner called the police and the police arrived and said, this is a man in uniform. You serve him or you shut down. And so there were people in that time that were taking significant stands to fight racism. And we do talk as well about the tragedy on Main Street in 1980 where Jeffrey Cordova and Juan Luis Garcia were shot by a Juan Luis officer and killed and how the community reacted to that in a way that ultimately was able to build bridges that they decided not to bring in outside agitators. They kept those out and really worked together as a community to build a lot of bridges between the Latinx community and the police at that time. And how El Comite came out of that. Yes, very important organization. Sharon is wondering, do you have info on the book about Native American tribes who inhabited the area where Longmont currently is? Yes, so the first chapter of the book really focuses on the earliest people and the people whose land we all really sit on to this day. Starting from the many thousands of years ago, not that long ago, we thought it was about 14,000 years. We now think it's much longer than that that people have lived in this area. And then coming up and we talk quite a bit, particularly about Chief Left Hand who was a Southern or Apoho Native leader who was probably the person that the earliest people that were writing about this area really had the most interaction with Chief Left Hand or Niwa, as it should be pronounced, who lived in this area and very, very farsighted individual. He actually learned English. His brother-in-law was a trader, a man named John Poisel, and probably learned English from him as well as other fur traders living in this area in the 1830s, 1840s. And Left Hand actually by some accounts even traveled east, maybe as far as Iowa, just to get a sense of who were these people coming into this area and tried very hard to create peace between the native tribes and the gold seekers. And unfortunately, he most likely was severely injured at the Sand Creek Massacre and died shortly thereafter, one of the darkest incidents in Colorado history. And unfortunately, an incident that a number of people living in the Longmont area, Longmont had not been founded at that point, but the precursor community of Burlington, there were about 20 people from Burlington that participated in that massacre. So there's definitely some dark times in Longmont history and I tried to make sure and illustrate those but also illustrate that we have been a very resilient community and we recognize those things and tried to make amends in more recent years. Clara has another question. She's wondering if you could expand upon the legend of Chief Nywats or Niwa. Is that how it's... Niwa is the more correct pronunciation as I understand it from a native speaker. She was wondering if you could touch on Chief Nywats curse and its relationship to Longmont. So the story, and again, it's hard to know whether this most likely is an apocryphal story. It did not make it into the book, but his curse is that when you have come to this area you may leave, but you will always want to return. You will always return that this is such a beautiful area that you can never truly leave without a backward glance. And I think it is true that anyone who has lived here always, they remain with fond memories of this area. I am not from here, but I left and came back. So, and there are lots of people I know who went to college here or lived here for a bit and then took a long break and then realized that they had to get back here. I'm one of those folks. I think that's about the end of our questions as far as I can tell. And I think this is a great parting moment here. I think if you aren't in Longmont for some reason and you haven't returned yet, you can always come back to Longmont via this book. So visit our website, longmontmuseum.org and order one and order one for everyone you know. I mean, if you live in Longmont and this is not on your coffee table within the next few months, I don't know. This belongs on everyone's coffee table as far as I'm concerned. Everyone's coffee table in Longmont. Well, thanks, Justin. Eric, I'm really enjoying the book. I can't wait. This is gonna be something that I can just turn to again and again and again. It's just, it's the book that keeps on giving. And I think it's coming right at the right time for us too. I mean, we're about to step into 2021 which is gonna be a much better year than 2020 not just because it's the sesquicentennial of Longmont but because it won't be 2020 anymore just for that reason itself. We're gonna be celebrating all year, the 150th anniversary of Longmont's founding in 2021, right? And then there's an exhibition going on. Yes, yes. So we will, in June we'll open up an exhibition called Longmont 150 that builds on a lot of what is in the book in terms of history but takes kind of a different approach. We're actually gonna be kind of flipping history on its head and starting from the present day and looking at some of the roots of things that we experienced today and how those are rooted in Longmont's history. So we're very excited about that exhibit. It'll run through the rest of 2021 from June onward. And we are in the midst of planning that exhibit now. So it's gonna be a great one. And the first part of 2021 we have a fabulous exhibit that we are super excited about, the Impressionists and including original works by Monet, Pissarro and just some extraordinary Impressionist works that we are delighted to be sharing with the Longmont community. And we'll have related programming throughout the winter and spring in regards to tying into that Impressionism exhibition. That's gonna be a lot of fun. We've got a lot to look forward to at the museum. 2021 it's gonna be a big year for us, I think. I wanna thank you again, Eric for taking some time this evening for a chat and for showing us a bit of your book. If we've just barely wetted your appetite here, I encourage you to pick one up and really dig in. As I mentioned, this is the last Thursday night, last of our Thursdays for the year. We do have one last program coming up on December 5th. It's our annual holiday show. And this year we're doing it in classic telethon style. So we'll have some of your favorite area bands performing and in between we'll be having little chats with folks. And it'll be a great holiday celebration and you'll have opportunities to support the museum. And at a certain level, I know that we'll be giving away the book with a certain level of gift in support of the museum. Anyway, I hope to see you all on December 5th. In the meantime, have a terrific Thanksgiving and Eric and I will see you at the museum or hope to see you at the museum soon. Thank you all.