By Anne Dyni   

As Niwot enters the next millennium, the future looks quite promising for our community. A century ago, as Niwotians stepped into the Twentieth Century, the future must have looked favorable as well. The pace was definitely slower in 1900, but merchants were busy and activity around the depot was fairly steady. Seven passenger trains stopped there each day. Traffic to Boulder and Longmont had been steady for years, especially since Niwot high school students had to travel elsewhere to attend secondary school.
 
The business district was undergoing radical changes in 1900 as merchants began to move to the east side of the tracks. This move initiated a building boom along Second Avenue and for a time, businesses existed on both sides of the railroad.
 
Swedish-born John Nelson had been a wagon maker in Niwot prior to 1900. When the business migration began, he turned his skills to carpentry and constructed some of the first buildings along Second Avenue. The first was Nelson Hall on the corner of Franklin Street. There he maintained an apartment for himself in half of the lower level and rented out the rest of the building. As a child, Amy Sherman Cushman remembers that Nelson always had a cigar in his mouth and a gold chain dangling from his watch pocket.
 
There were several lodges in town at the turn of the century; Odd Fellows, Rebekahs, Modern Woodmen and Royal Neighbors. Most of them met upstairs in Nelson Hall.
 
Left Hand Grange held their meetings in Batchelder School at the corner of Monarch Road and 63rd Street, but were raising money for a hall of their own. To do so, they created a building corporation in 1891, the NiWot Building and Development Company which sold stock in the proposed hall. Grange Master Thomas Richart became company president and depot agent Will T. Wilson was treasurer. Through the corporation, they were able to fund construction of a small frame building west of the flour mill on Second Avenue.
 
When Frank Bader was postmaster in 1895, the post office counter was at the rear of his Bader Brothers general store on Hinman Street. He, too, joined the migration across the tracks in 1900 and built a home at Franklin and Second Avenue. Thomas Richart became postmaster at the turn of the century. Then, as today, townsfolk received their mail at the post office while a rural carrier delivered it to the outlying areas. 
 
Nels Lind was section foreman for the railroad and lived with his family in a house beside the tracks, directly south of the depot. Eric Ereckson was constable, and Niwot was represented on the Board of County Commissioners by Henry Burch. Burch also served on the local school board, which supervised the new brick schoolhouse on Niwot Road and Franklin.
 
There was no local newspaper as 1900 approached, but a Niwot column in the Boulder News and Banner reported on the town’s social activities and farm news. The reporter signed his name "Phatt Boy", but everyone knew it was local businessman George A. Wright.
 
When the Niwot Weekly News began publication in 1912, its first editorial painted a glowing picture of Niwot’s economic health. "Niwot the beautiful - the center of a rich farming district where financial depressions are unheard of - where gilt-edged investments abound - where the old enjoy rest and quietude - where health and prosperity dwelleth - where public spirit animates." 

The optimistic editor, Glenn Conkling even predicted that incorporation was imminent.