Longmont, Colorado

Longmont was a planned town from day one. In November 1870, a group of Chicago businessmen incorporated the Chicago-Colorado Colony, selling memberships to fund a new agricultural community out west. A committee that included Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers and former lumberman Seth Terry came out to Colorado Territory in early 1871, and Terry led a party of settlers to the confluence of Left Hand and St. Vrain Creeks, where a one-square-mile town was surveyed and platted. They named it Longmont for the view of Longs Peak on the western horizon — the "Long Mont." The colony carried an idealistic streak, adopting the motto of industry, temperance, and morality, and it left marks that outlasted it: early public parks, one of the state's first public libraries, and downtown streets — Bross, Collyer, Pratt, Terry — still named for its founders.

What made Longmont was water and dirt. Colonists built a robust irrigation system, and on March 30, 1873 water began flowing into the eight-mile Highland Ditch, turning the plains around town into productive farmland. For most of a century Longmont ran on agriculture and the industries that processed it: flour mills starting in 1872, the J.H. Empson vegetable cannery in 1889, and the Great Western Sugar factory in 1903, drawing waves of Scandinavian, Eastern European, Japanese, and Latin American laborers to work the sugar-beet fields. The city adopted a home-rule charter in 1961, and its economy pivoted with the times — a federal aviation facility arrived in 1962 and IBM announced a big plant in 1965, quietly turning a farm town toward technology.