Longmont holds virtual birthday bash to mark its 150th year

One hundred and fifty years of history is a lot to unpack in an evening but Longmont officials and residents did their best Thursday during a virtual birthday celebration. 

The city officially reached the sesquicentennial milestone on Tuesday, and Thursday’s party at the Longmont Museum delved into the past and participants’ hopes for the future. 

The event began with Mayor Brian Bagley reading a proclamation that pays tribute to  the many Native American tribes who lived in the area, Longmont’s agricultural history, the creation of city-owned utilities and recognizing the challenges the city has faced in the past 150 years.

Those challenges brought with them resiliency, which Erik Mason, the Longmont Museum’s curator of history, highlighted in a brief review of the city’s history.

Many of Longmont’s challenges and changes — embezzlement, a shift from rural to urban, racial tension, growth — could be ripped from today’s headlines rather than the history books.

Longmont was born as the Chicago Colorado Colony, which started with one dishonest member “contributing to his own pocket,” resulting in the colony quickly facing financial hardship, Mason said. As a result, the founding members reorganized to become what is now Longmont, he said.

In the 1960s, Longmont was primarily agricultural but before long the area saw a boom in technology that began with the arrival of a Federal Aviation Administration air traffic control tower, which soon led to other tech industries such as IBM, Amgen and Seagate making the city their home. 

“Longmont today is very much a high-tech center,” Mason said. 

Being a high-tech hub spurred growth that didn’t go unnoticed outside city limits as recently as 2019, when financial advising and credit monitoring company SmartAsset ranked the city its No. 1 “boomtown” after conducting a study of 500 communities across the country.

SmartAsset used seven metrics — population change, unemployment rate, GDP growth rate, change in the unemployment rate, growth in the number of businesses, change in the number of housing units and change in median household income — in determining its rankings.

Another catalyst for community change happened Aug. 14, 1980, when Juan Luis Garcia and Jeffrey Cordova were shot and killed by a Longmont police officer. Instead of the event tearing Longmont apart, the community came together and came out stronger, Mason said.

Key to that unity were the eight founders of the group that came to be El Comité de Longmont, which remains dedicated to providing advocacy and social services for Latinos and non-Latinos in Longmont and Boulder.

The leaders of El Comité were noted in several 1980 newspaper articles for keeping the Hispanic community calm during talks with the city. Those talks included discussing a list of demands for the city that included police stop harassing Hispanic residents, more training for police officers in Hispanic culture and that a fluent Spanish speaking ombudsman be established in the police department.

The deaths of Cordova and Garcia gave people a foundation” to begin to do social advocacy, social justice work from different angles” and sparked the realization that something needed to change for the benefit of youth and community as a whole, Carmen Ramirez, community and neighborhood resources manager for Longmont, told the Leader in August. It prompted questions about “how do we facilitate bringing people together, how do we provide resources for needs and how do we empower those communities to have a voice at the table,” she said. 

Ensuring diverse voices is just as relevant today community guests at the celebration said, including Karen Kanemoto Wood, whose grandfather, Goroku Kanemoto, immigrated to the United States from Japan to work on the railroad and settled in the area after jumping off a train traveling from Mexico to Canada. The Kanemotos moved to Longmont to become farmers and her father, George, was born here in 1919.

The family donated the land on which a park bearing their name is located and built a pagoda named the Tower of Compassion there. 

In sharing her uncle Jim’s hopes for the future, she said, “The greatness of this nation lies in its diversity, in its differences and in the fact that we came from many different lands. We are better, stronger people because we can build on what the entire world has to share with us. We must not forget what happened in the past  and be vigilant in our commitment to stand up to violations of civil rights no matter who today’s or tomorrow’s victims may be and to ensure that no group of Americans will ever again suffer the denial of their basic human rights under the Constitution of this great nation.” 

Olga Cordero, a St. Vrain Valley School District student services counselor, grew up in Longmont, living in a house with her immigrant parents, uncle and 10 other children. Cordero said one of her favorite parts of growing up in Longmont was translating for her father as he conducted business around town. It taught her to embrace being bilingual and bicultural, she said. 

To the future generations Cordero said, “All of you out there who are bilingual, trilingual, feel proud, be excited and use your language and your culture to build each other up because it’s super special … Speak your truth. Be proud of who you are. See color, see the uniqueness and celebrate them.”

The virtual party wound down with the opening of a time capsule created for Longmont’s 125th anniversary celebration. The box included three scrapbooks filled with pictures, articles, drawings and letters from the past. Two of those scrapbooks were made by students, Lindsay in first grade and Lisa in sixth grade. 

Mason said an additional time capsule is buried outside the Longmont Civic Center, which will be retrieved for another celebration when the ground thaws. 

The evening closed with Longmont City Council members singing “Happy Birthday” accompanied by the Longmont Symphony Orchestra. 

The museum has planned a number of events to continue celebrating the city’s 150 years including “The History of Race and Social Justice” on Thursday, “Monet’s Longmont” on March 11, “The Longmonster” on April 1 and “Stories of Longmont Parks: A Conversation with Paula Fitzgerald” on April 29. The celebration will continue into the summer with the Summer Concert Series.

On Aug. 7, the museum plans to open a special exhibit to commemorate the sesquicentennial celebration.

“We are seeking specific artifacts to tie into stories that we are developing for this exhibit — objects related to the history of beer and alcohol in Longmont, photos of cruising in Longmont, items related to the struggle for racial equity in Longmont, and damaged items from last fall’s Calwood fire near Longmont. In general, we seek items that help to tell the story of Longmont,”  Mason said last month.

Anyone with items to contribute to the exhibit can contact Mason at 303-651-8969 or [email protected].