Events
Collection of event entities.
Pages
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- Fruita Union High School fire of 1934
- On September 24, 1934, a fire burnt down the first Fruita Union High School, which was located on South Maple Street in the Reed Park block. The fire began on the roof. All students and teachers escaped the building in time, and no one was hurt. Students were able to grab musical instruments and some athletic equipment, but had to leave the school’s new textbooks behind. Though it was worried that the fire, which came from unknown origins, would spread to other buildings, firefighters responding from Fruita and Grand Junction were largely able to keep it from doing so. The school was built in 1904. Prior to that time, high school students took classes in the Fruita Central School. A new school, funded by bond and grant and built with WPA labor, was built and opened in Fall 1936 at 239 North Maple. *Some information for this history comes from In the Beginning... A History of the Districts and Schools that Became Mesa County Valley School District Number 51 by Albert and Terry LaSalle.
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- Grand Junction Centennial Celebration
- The celebration of Grand Junction’s 100th anniversary. Activities began in September of 1981, corresponding with the 100-year anniversary of the settlement of the first white people in Grand Junction after the forced expulsion and resettlement of the Ute Indians from the area. Activities continued into 1982. Such activities included the recording of several radio plays about area history for the Grand Junction Centennial Celebration Radio History Theater series. These radio plays were broadcast on local radio stations once a week over the course of a year, beginning on September 26, 1981. The Mesa County Historical Society and the Museum of Western Colorado also put on a pageant/theater presentation at Stocker Stadium in Lincoln Park. Each evening for two weeks, an actor dressed as John Otto narrated the history of the town, while other actors presented scenes from that history. The town held a centennial celebration parade in 1982. During the parade, the Grand Junction’s oldest native, Eugene Perry, was honored. Members of the Centennial Celebration Committee tasked with planning the pageant and other events included chairman Robert “Bob” Collins, Al Look, historian John Brumgardt, and Dick Weber.
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- Grand Junction Community Concert series
- A series of concerts run first by Walter Walker in the 1920’s, and later by music teacher and promotor Marie Treece after her arrival at Mesa College (now Colorado Mesa University). Under Walker’s leadership, musicians played primarily in Lincoln Park. Treece brought musicians to Houston Hall and other venues. Musicians that played in the community concert series included Al Jolson, Ethel Barrymore, John Philip Sousa, Barnie Oldfield, Roland Hayes, Pauline Frederick, Thomas Marshall, Carl Sandburg, and Thomas Edison.
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- Grand Junction Lions Club Carnival
- The Grand Junction Lions Club was chartered in October of 1921 and immediately began raising money to help out various projects and organizations for the betterment of our community, including the early Grand Junction Junior College (now Colorado Mesa University). The Grand Junction Lions Club still holds its annual Carnival and Parade (which first started in 1929) as its sole fundraiser and has given back more than $4,000,000 back to the local community. The first carnival was organized and promoted by B.M. Benge and Orlo Williams and netted $300. During the first carnival, there was dancing, beer, prizes, groceries, and cakes. There were also sideshows, a beauty contest and a roulette wheel. A vaudeville-like musical comedy was held at the Avalon Theater, with members dressed in drag. Later carnivals were held inside the Lincoln Park Barn. When the number of attendees grew so much that the carnival no longer fit inside the barn, the Lions Club moved their event to the newly constructed Two Rivers Plaza. According to Al Look, the 1981 carnival raised $100,600 for the Lions Club and their various causes.
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- Grand Junction tornado of 1912
- A destructive tornado that went through downtown Grand Junction. It knocked down part of the YMCA building's facade, killing Alfred Gallup (The YMCA building was located between White and Rood Avenues on 5th Street).
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- Grand Junction train depot munitions fire
- A fire on June 27, 1943 that was caused by the heating of U.S. Army munitions aboard a freight train during World War II. Raymond Edward Myers was a carman who worked for the D&RG. According to Myers, he was sent by the railroad to Rifle to repair a car on a West-bound ammunition train that day. He did so, and he and the crew rode the train to Grand Junction. Just past De Beque, the crew noticed a hotbox (an overheated axle) in a car in the middle of the train. The crew stopped the train and separated the engine in order to repair the car. Myers only had a few minutes to repack the hotbox before the next train came along. He did so, with others helping him in his work. The car was thought fixed. According to railroad employee Frank Chiaro, when the train arrived in Grand Junction, some of the crew of the train went into the Beanery, a restaurant at the depot (Chiaro was not at the depot at this time, and so would have heard this information second hand). It was then that the hot box caught fire, and flames spread to the floor of the car. Myers stayed behind and walked from the caboose up to where the problem car was located, past approximately 40 cars. He saw that the inside of the car was in flames. He ran to the yard office to get a fire extinguisher. While he was in the office, the car blew up. He went out to find that two cars had been pulled forward to around Main Street, while the rest of the ammunition train had been pulled back to the new yard, about two miles east. According to oral history interviewee Frank Chiaro, who lived on Lawrence Avenue near the depot at the time of the accident, the fire happened around 2 am. Shells began to explode, and to shoot up over the western part of downtown. Chiaro and his sister Mary (Chiaro) Colosimo, who was also interviewed, both remembered waking up in terror and thinking they were under attack. Chiaro and his wife ran to the back of their brick house, where they sheltered from what they believed was an attack for the duration of the night. They could see shells streaking overhead and hear constant explosions. Towards dawn, he said, the explosion of shells came more infrequently. US Army engineers from Colorado Springs were brought in to destroy the bombs. They constructed a “trap” to dispose of the munitions. Residents reported where bombs had been found, and others brought the bombs to the Army. Fire chief Charles Downing lost his arm in the explosions. Victor Griffith, a switchman, was able to separate the rest of the train from the three cars that were burning, and take that part of the train all the way back to the section of track along the Gunnison River, below the Orchard Mesa cemetery. He was commended for his bravery and promoted. The fire nearly burned down the Biggs-Kurtz lumber warehouse. It was saved from destruction only by an unknown soldier (who, according to Josephine Biggs, was "drunk as a lord"). No one could grab the fire hose and get close enough to the fire with all of the explosions, but he appeared from nowhere, grabbed the hose, and got close enough to the building to wet everything down.
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- Grand Mesa flood of 1911
- When a reservoir broke, it flooded Plateau Creek and washed out the Plateau road.
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- Grand Valley Teacher's Convention
- A convention that was held during the month of October in Grand Junction, Colorado during the early Twentieth century. It may have begun when the Colorado Education Association Teacher's Meeting was held in Grand Junction (the first of the statewide organization's to be held there). It was continued as a locally organized event in later years.
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- Great Pueblo Flood of 1921
- A flood that occurred when levees on the Arkansas River were breached after heavy rainfall. The flood began on June 3rd, and flood waters reached a height of 27.36 feet. Somewhere between 150 to 250 people died in the flooding, and much of the city was destroyed. 300 square miles were flooded, with hundreds of houses, business and cars demolished (“Anniversary of the Great Pueblo Flood of 1921” by James Rogers, Denver Public Library blog). Cordelia (Hamilton) Files, a Western Colorado resident who was a patient in Clark’s Mineral Wells Sanitorium in Pueblo at the time, recalls that all of the staff of the sanitorium and many of the patients evacuated, leaving those who couldn’t do so to fend for themselves. From their vantage point on the third floor, they could see people fleeing to escape the floodwaters, with not all of them succeeding. They saw all manner of things float by and could hear them run into the building during the night. The waters, according to Files, reached the level of the third-floor windows before finally starting to recede. She saw the flood waters reach the cupula of the Catholic Church across the street. The police and Red Cross placed her with a family in town. She stayed with them for three weeks before being able to go home. *Public domain photograph of the Great Pueblo Flood