By Pamela Johnson,The Reporter-Herald
GLEN HAVEN — Nearly four years ago, floods reduced the Glen Haven Town Hall to a pile of debris, unrecognizable as the community center it had been for more than 70 years.
Thursday, community members gathered across the main street from that site — on land outside the floodplain — and celebrated the upcoming construction of a new town hall.
“We went through a devastating part of 2013 with the flood,” Glen Haven Association board president Jake Shimon said at a groundbreaking for the new town hall. “We lost 26 houses. We lost seven out of nine businesses. We lost our roads, our bridges. But we never lost our faith, and we never lost our perseverance to rebuild our Glen Haven.”
And that perseverance continues as they work to raise money to literally “raise the roof” on a new town hall.
The project’s $500,000 budget will be covered by donated money.Fundraising still is about $200,000 short, so the town has two events planned this summer — a barbecue and music festival on June 24 and a tour of historic cabins on July 30. Tickets and donation information are available at .
In the meantime, the Glen Haven Association expects tochoose a contractor within the next week and construction to be complete by March.
Residents of the Glen Haven, a community that is spread out along County Road 43 northeast of Estes Park, literally dug themselves out and rebuilt homes and cabins after the flood with the help of their neighbors and volunteers from across the country. Unlike some communities hit by the flooding, Glen Haven is not a registered town, so it was not eligible for a lot of disaster funding.
Instead, residents pulled together as a community.
“It wasn’t the government that put this back together,” added Bert Johansen, who runs the post office. “It was the residents who live here.”
Read more of this story at
