Back in 1930 there was no online shopping at Christmas time. There was no mall and no chain stores surrounded by massive parking lots. Instead there were homemade gifts, mail-order catalogs like Sears-Roebuck, and small, locally owned shops downtown. One such shop was Wolfer’s Market, located at 137 S. College Ave. (Wolfer’s later moved down to the corner of College and Laurel, where Noodles is located today.)
The photo above shows Wolfer’s Market on December 5, 1930. (The photo is from the CSU Digital Archive – #UHPCS05K204220.) Residents could hop on the streetcar and head downtown for all of their holiday shopping needs, from decorations to gifts to food. Note several boxes of apples and nuts available near the front of the Wolfer’s store. There’s also lacy ribbon candies mixed in decoratively in front of the nuts.
Whether you’ve finished all of your holiday shopping already, or you’re still frantically running from store to store, I hope that in the end you’ll have a delightful, and restful, holiday season.
1918 on the Bee Family Farm
Marion, John and Francis Bee in front of the Christmas tree in 1918. (Photo from Liz Harrison, daughter of Francis Bee.)
The Bee Family Centennial Farm is one of only a few Centennial farms in the state of Colorado. That means it’s one of only a few farms that have remained within the same family for a hundred years or more. That’s quite an accomplishment!
What’s really neat about the Bee Farm, though, is the Bee’s tradition of thrift. Items that still might have use weren’t thrown away. Which is why turning the farm into an agricultural museum made so much sense. There are buildings, tools, furniture and much more at the Bee Museum that has been in the family for decades. Many museums are filled with items that help to recreate what the place might have looked like long ago — but the items themselves were found in other places. With the Bee Farm Museum, everything is original!
I wanted to include a Christmas photo from the Bee family in this post. So I contacted Liz Harrison (daughter of Francis Bee) and she sent the above photo over to me with a note that this was “the only Christmas tree they had. Our Grandfather thought it took trees too long to grow to just cut them down.” The man’s got a point.
The museum won’t be open again until May. But in the meantime, I highly recommend you check out this thirty minute PBS film on some of Colorado’s Centennial farms. The Bee Farm is included!
And thank you, Bee family, for supporting Forgotten Fort Collins over the past year!
Larimer County Historical Society
Jason Labelle is the director of CSU’s center for Mountain and Plains Archaeology. (Photo from the CSU website.)
The Fort Collins Historical Society will be starting up again on January 10th at the Masonic Temple located at 225 W. Oak Street at 7pm. (Enter through the back door, or use the ground level floor in front that’s closest to Howes.)
Jason Labelle will be speaking on the earliest inhabitants of what we now think of as northern Colorado. If you’re interested in ancient history, archaeology, Native peoples, or anthropology, this would be a great time to come and hear a Historical Society talk.
All meetings are free and open to the public.
And thank you Fort Collins Historical Society for sponsoring Forgotten Fort Collins!
Happy Holidays!
CSU’s photo archive is outstanding. In 1980, when I was preparing a historical display for the Rocky Mountain Forest & Range Experiment Station (RMFRES) for the USDA Forest Service (they insisted on the DA being there), I got to spend two half days browsing their photos in search of a photo of the building the Station had been in when it was located on campus. I have to admit, I may have looked at photos that weren’t strictly part of my mission.
I saw photos of the old Library on campus (which was the music building during my twenty years in town, and which is now something else), before and after the Spring Creek flood, and of the campus when it was just Old Main, then Old Main and Spruce Hall, and of the chemistry building that burned down in the 20s. For a while after that session, I knew when I was walking through the place where a building had been, and which building it was.
I did finally find a photo, and put it in the display. I visited the station once, a few years after I left, and the display was still there. No idea if it’s there now.
Another great thing about the CSU photo collection is the aerial photo of town that was (is?) on the wall by the desk. Huge photo! I could make out details like the pool of the Westmore Beach & Blade Club at Campus West, and even see a sort of 0 with a line through it in the yard next door to my old house. That’s where the neighbor kids drove their dad’s old pickup (after he got a new one) around and around the back part of their two-acre lot. It was a step up from pushing broken bikes around their yard making “RRMMM-RRMMMMM” noises (though my friend and I used to bust ourselves up by imagining that they were doing the noises while they drove the truck around).
I’m glad, too, that most of the photos I see from CSU are big enough to see. So many of the photos at the Facebook place are the same size as their previews: tiny!
I love the CSU Archive. And I do the same thing. There are so many times I’m looking for one thing but come across several other photos that make me think, “Oh, I should write a story on that. … And I should write a story on that…. … and that. … and that….” It’s addictive.
The photos posted to Facebook are often originally from the City Archive, and I’ve heard that those were all originally scanned at that really small size because they just didn’t have enough storage space to scan them any larger. 😀 I think that anything new that’s uploaded is at a higher resolution now that space can be had much more cheaply these days.
I have a couple of fantasies: One is that they will scan all those photos at a decent resolution, and the other is that the library will send their microfilms of the Coloradoan (and all its predecessors) to the Internet Archive, which I believe would scan them for free and host them online.
I used to walk in to town from school once in a while so I could either hang out at my parents’ workplaces (Red Cross office and a music studio, usually located within Kyle’s) or go to the library. If I went to the library, I’d often end up scrolling microfilms till I felt a touch of motion sickness and had to stop. I’d follow the comics, or selected comics, or enjoy the sections.
Sections: There’d be a page of Loveland news, and perhaps within that there’d be a couple of boxes for news from Longmont, Wellington, etc. News from Wellington might include something like, “The Johnsons had visitors from Scottsbluff on Saturday. The guests were shown vacation slides.” The TV and radio guides are illuminating as well.
I always love the party news. So and so had a lovely party with delightful pink decorations on a silk chiffon baby blue back drop, blah blah blah.
You never hear, “Mrs. R. H. Snodhouse threw a really wretched party. The punch was just awful.” 😉
If they had them now, they’d say that they played Wii games and watched Netflix.