By Anne Dyni

On March 30, 1875, the official plat of Niwot was filed with the Boulder County Clerk of the Territory of Colorado. From its humble beginning 125 years ago, Niwot grew to proportions never imagined by its founders, Porter Hinman and Ambrose Murray. 

Porter Hinman came to the Left Hand Valley in 1860 and eventually laid claim to several hundred acres of land. He, like many of his neighbors, welcomed the extension of the railroad from Golden to Longmont in 1873. He viewed its arrival as an opportunity for local farmers to ship their agricultural products and livestock to distant markets. 

In anticipation of Niwot’s future growth, application for a post office was granted a year before the plat was filed. Once the town was established, trains stopped twice daily to pick up and deliver mail, freight and passengers. A depot with holding pens and a loading chute was built west of the tracks, and as enterprising merchants and laborers were drawn to the area, a small business district began to grow.

A general store, a feed store and a blacksmith shop west of the depot met the needs of the surrounding community. A church and a one-room schoolhouse had been constructed prior to 1875, and local farmers were already attending Left Hand Grange meetings in the Batchelder school at 63rd and Monarch Road. Once a dairy, alfalfa mill and flour mill were established, Niwot was recognized as a distribution center for milk, alfalfa, grains and livestock. 

Prior to 1900, Niwot’s entire business district had been located west of the railroad, but that was soon to change. While a few merchants remained where they were, others moved east of the tracks to what had been the residential part of town. Looking west in this photograph, Nelson Hall stands on the far left. 

Continuing down the street are the post office, a residence, and a flour mill which actually stood on the far side of the tracks. The distant boxcar in the middle of the street was parked on a side track behind the depot to its right. Coming back up the right side of the street are the bandstand, the Niwot State Bank, the firehouse, the Livingston Hotel, the Niwot mercantile building and Dr. Dean’s office/drugstore on the corner. 

Of these original buildings, only half remain standing today. These have changed little except their identity over the intervening years. Newer buildings have long since replaced the others.

A birds-eye view looking northeast from atop the flour mill reveals Niwot in the 1920s. Railroad cars behind the depot wait to be loaded with livestock for market. On the other side of the tracks, another boxcar stands below the sugar beet dump, ready to transport the local beet harvest to Longmont. There it will be processed in the Great Western Sugar Company refinery. Sugar beets had been the principal cash crop in the Left Hand Valley since about 1905 and would remain so until the 1940s. 

By 1960, everything depicted in this photograph except the main railroad track would be gone, as state highway crews prepared for a new road connecting Longmont to Boulder.

By 1947, Main Street had changed. The hitching posts from earlier years were obsolete, as revealed by Don Spangler’s Texaco station in the middle of the block. The post office building was being used as a church, and Nelson Hall had become the new home of the Left Hand Grange. Rev. Taylor’s White House grocery store had changed hands several times, and was now Bradford’s Store. Its cottonwood trees were well on their way to becoming the grand old trees we know today. West of Bradford’s was another store, and beyond Murray Street stood Hogsett’s lumber, hardware and farm implement dealership.

In 1957, Hinman Ditch once again overflowed its banks sending water to the front steps of many buildings along Main Street. Niwot had always been susceptible to flooding from wet spring storms because rising water had no place to drain. The town site is almost completely flat. 

When Old Town merchants proposed street improvements in 1990, the project proved to be far more complicated than a cosmetic face lift. Construction crews not only wrestled with minimal elevation changes, but concerns about buried gasoline tanks and the encroachment of huge trees along proposed curb lines were a continual challenge.

Today, in its 125th year, Niwot is no longer an agricultural or railroad town. In fact, until the Burlington Northern train delivered Santa Claus to holiday crowds last December, no train had stopped in Niwot for decades. 

Still, the town remains healthy and continues to serve the surrounding community whose demands are infinitely different from those in 1875. 

Photos courtesy the Niwot Historical Association, Idell Leinweber, Don Spangler, and the Alva Dodd family.