By Anne Dyni

The concept of women in business is hardly new. Although the number of business women today far exceeds that of a century ago, many women in Boulder County were successfully running boarding houses, operating stagecoach stations and teaching school long before 1900.

Although area business directories prior to that time list only one professional woman in Niwot, Mary Jones, housekeeper, 1896, school records are more revealing. Most teachers employed by Niwot’s School District #7 were women. Some, like Idell McKee Kneale, Isabel Knaus, Jane Jessee and Luella Henry, were from local families.

While Luella never married, her younger sister Cordia had been widowed and remarried to a man who did little to support her and their children. In order to provide food for the table and therapeutic care for her husband, Cordia became postmaster in the little red building beside the grange hall.

Helping her with rural mail delivery was Luella Blanton. Luella had never intended to become a mailman, but circumstances dictated that she assume her husband’s job after his fatal accident. King Blanton died during a severe hailstorm in 1916, when his delivery horse panicked and pinned him underneath the mail wagon.

From 1875 until 1910 when the business district was located on the west side of the tracks, all of Niwot’s postmasters were men. Each conducted postal business from behind a small counter at the rear of his store. But from 1911 to 1922, a series of women held the position. The first, Julia Stockley, worked in Niwot’s first official post office building, located on Murray Street. Her picture hangs above the counter in today’s post office.

As more businesses appeared along Second Avenue, the number of working women increased. Louise Newell came to Niwot with her husband Lee in the early 1920s. They purchased the little red post office, replaced Cordia as postmaster and turned the building into a grocery store with a postal window inside. Their ad in a 1923 Niwot Tribune listed candies, coffee, cigars and school supplies available in what they called "The Post Office Store." Louise, like other wives in town, was in partnership with her husband and remained so until they moved away in the 1940s.

Across the street, the Livingston Hotel operated primarily as a boarding house for mill workers and railroad section hands. Ownership changed periodically, but it was the wife of each new owner who saw that lodging operations ran smoothly while her husband held another job. The hotel’s front porch extended to the edge of the street and Doyle Jones recalled exercising caution when walking past the establishment. Proprietor Mrs. Walden often sat on the porch chewing and spitting tobacco into the street.

When William and Mattie Sutton purchased the hotel around 1920, Mattie hired Naomi Tillbury’s mother, then a young girl, to clean rooms. William established a blacksmith shop next door where the Whistlestop now stands. His tragic death at the heels of a client’s horse propelled Mattie into sole ownership of the hotel, a position she held for several years.

Delia Wilson had one of the more challenging occupations in town. While her crippled husband Will T. served as station agent, she managed platform duties at the train depot. In an equally demanding job, Florence Hayes served as associate editor of her husband’s newspaper The Niwot Tribune.

Belle Dodd clerked for Hogsett’s Lumber and Mercantile until resigning to keep the books for the Niwot State Bank where many in her family were already employed. The bank closed permanently during the Depression, and after a series of owners, it was purchased by Eva Hornbaker Spangler.

Eva had been appointed postmaster when the Newells left town and promptly moved postal operations to her own building. At about the same time, her husband Newt replaced Will T. Wilson as station agent, so this two-career couple worked directly across the tracks from one another. After Newt became terminally ill, the entire family moved into cramped quarters in the rear of the post office.

Today, a large number of Niwot businesses are owned by women. They are continuing a trend that began, albeit slowly, more than a century ago.