LITTLETON — There’s a birthday bash going on this weekend — and 44,000 people will be celebrating.
Littleton is turning 125 — known to those who note such things as a quasquicentennial celebration — with
The city is one of seven Colorado municipalities — and the biggest — hitting the century-and-a-quarter mark this year. The others are Windsor, Sheridan, Elizabeth, De Beque, Cheyenne Wells and tiny Walden.
“It is interesting to me to see that there is still that character that Richard Little embodied when he first arrived here,” said Littleton Museum director Tim Nimz.
That character is the sense of independence and self-reliance that Little, an engineer, exhibited after arriving in the Colorado Territory from New Hampshire in 1860.
Little started the Rough and Ready Flour Mill in the South Platte Valley, served as the area’s first postmaster and rebuilt the mill when it was destroyed in a fire.
He filed a plat for the village of Littleton in 1872. Eighteen years later, it became a city.
“It’s testimony to the fact that Littleton grew up largely independent of Denver,” Nimz said.
Two rail lines — the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Denver and Rio Grande — snaked through town, allowing Littleton to remain largely self-sufficient.
“We were not a suburb of Denver — we were a little independent community,” said Sally Parsons, who has lived in Littleton since 1958 and served as the city’s first female mayor in the 1970s. “Geographically, we may have been a suburb, but not in thinking.”
Donna Smith, 80, said the population influx with new industries that popped up around the south metro area after World War II came as “kind of a shock” to those who had lived in Littleton awhile.
Smith has been in the city since 1949.
While the economic growth brought about by the Glenn L. Martin Company — the precursor to today’s Lockheed Martin — the Marathon Oil Company research center and Centennial Race Track was welcomed, it put pressure on Littleton’s small-town feel, Smith said.
“Things changed in a hurry. They had to build five new elementary schools,” she said. “We’ve fought hard to keep the sense of community.”
That was made easier by the establishment of a quaint downtown that acts as the city’s anchor and continues to attract locals and out-of-towners.
Smith said Littleton has had its challenges. Many of the companies that located in the city in the 1950s and ’60s left in the ’80s. Then there was .
A torrent of water, created by thunderstorms miles to the south, and forced the river to carry 40 times its normal flow.
It flooded golf courses and the horse racetrack in Littleton, becoming the city’s costliest disaster ever.
“It really did affect our town for quite a long time,” Smith said.
But nothing may have been as trying for Littleton as what happened just three years after its incorporation, according to History Colorado state historian Bill Convery.
The Panic of 1893, brought about by the collapse of the silver industry, sent Colorado into an economic tailspin and marked the beginning of the end of mining’s dominance in the state. What started as boom times in 1890 turned into a disaster several years later.
“Colorado’s economy completely collapsed,” Convery said. “The preponderance of our economy at that time came from a single industry.”
But the setback also sowed the seeds for new industries to take hold — sugar beets, dryland wheat, cattle ranching and tourism — that eventually brought prosperity back to the Centennial State.
While some old mining towns in Colorado are forever lost to history, the seven cities and towns in Colorado resilient enough to make it to their quasquicentennial in 2015 show the power of keeping at it through thick and thin, Convery said.
“If you’re a long-term investor,” he said, “all of these communities were a good bet.”
John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold
Celebrating 125 years in 2015
Municipality —— Population 1890 ——— Population now
Littleton ————– 1,000———————- 44,275
Windsor —————- 150 ———————- 20,422
Sheridan ————— 400 ——————— 5,874
Elizabeth ————– 300 ———————- 1,373
De Beque —————NA ——————— 496
Walden —————— 75 ———————— 590
Cheyenne Wells ——– 400 ———————- 871
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, History Colorado
