Saturday, September 5, 2026

The University of Colorado opens with one building and a bell on the stairs

1877 · Old Main, Boulder

On Sept. 5, 1877, the University of Colorado opened in a single brick building on a hill south of Boulder Creek. A brass band played. Fire companies marched. The campus bell had not made it into the tower yet, so someone rang it from the stone steps and called that good enough.

Colorado had been a state for thirteen months and still did not have a working public university. Boulder families had donated the land. The territorial legislature had matched $15,000 only after townspeople pledged the same. Old Main went up anyway, cracked under a too-heavy slate roof, got iron rods and shingles, and was declared safe in July.

Opening day was a parade pretending to be a school. Three fire companies in bright uniforms, the Columbia Lodge of Masons, guests from Denver, and a band working through We Hail Thee! Great Fountain of Learning and Light. Inside the one building lived classrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a one-room library, and President Joseph Sewall plus family. The student body was a few dozen people, most of them still in the preparatory school, because the new state did not yet have enough high schools to feed a college. Ages ran from about twelve to twenty-three. There were young women in the room from day one.

Mary Rippon, the first woman on the faculty, arrived the next year. The medical school started on the third floor with two students and the president teaching. The library began with two books from former governor William Gilpin and a few bags of federal documents from Senator Henry Teller. Charles Buckingham soon gave $2,000 for actual books, which is how a university admits it has been making it up as it goes.

A century and a half later the flagship still sits on that hill. Old Main is still the oldest building on campus. The bell eventually made the tower. The rest of the campus filled in around a first day that started with a bell on the stairs and a town that had already paid for the idea twice.

Sources: University of Colorado Board of Regents — authorization · Wikipedia — University of Colorado Boulder · Boulder Reporting Lab — opening day · CU Libraries — first library in Old Main

Tabor opens Denver a Grand Opera House, then the curtain tells on him

1881 · 16th and Curtis Streets, Denver

On Sept. 5, 1881, silver king Horace Tabor opened the Tabor Grand Opera House at 16th and Curtis. Emma Abbott sang the Mad Scene from Lucia and then all of Maritana for a soaked, packed house of about 1,500. The programs were perfumed silk. The building lasted until urban renewal took it in 1964.

Tabor had already given Leadville an opera house. Denver, he decided, needed the most expensive building the city had ever seen. Chicago architects Willoughby and Frank Edbrooke delivered a Second Empire pile in red brick and Manitou limestone, cherrywood from Japan, mahogany from Honduras, a crystal chandelier, and a ceiling painted like sunset. Estimates put the bill around $850,000, which in 1881 was the kind of number you said slowly.

Opening night arrived in a chilly drizzle. Railroads ran extra trains. Citizens handed Tabor a gold watch fob shaped like an ore bucket. Abbott, paid a $20,000 guarantee plus train fare, could not resist starting with Lucia's Mad Scene before Wallace's Maritana, the opera she had actually booked. The Rocky Mountain News used the word perfection and meant it.

The drop curtain quoted Charles Kingsley: So fleet the works of men, back to the earth again; ancient and holy things fade like a dream. Tabor lost the silver, lost the house in the 1890s, and the theater slid from opera to movies to grindhouse. Urban-renewal wrecking crews finished the quote in 1964. Leadville's smaller Tabor still stands. Denver kept the marker and the plot. If a Colorado story is going to be an opera, it might as well put the ending on the curtain before the overture.

Sources: Colorado Encyclopedia — Tabor Grand Opera House · Colorado Virtual Library — opening night · Wikipedia — Timeline of Denver · History Colorado magazine, March 1941

Denver hits 101, the hottest September afternoon on the books

2020 · Denver International Airport

On Sept. 5, 2020, Denver officially reached 101 degrees. It broke the daily record, became the hottest September reading ever measured here, and was the latest triple-digit day on the city's climate record. Three days later the airport measured an inch of snow.

September 5 already had a heat reputation. In 1899 the city hit 97, a mark that later Septembers kept tying like a family argument. 2019 had finally put 100 on the September page at DIA. 2020 decided the argument needed a period.

The official thermometer at the airport, out on that honest slab of prairie, reached 101. That is still the September record and still the latest 100-degree reading Denver has posted. The next afternoon tied 97. The 7th hit 93 and became the 73rd 90-degree day of the year. Then a cold front arrived with the manners of a slammed screen door. On Sept. 8 the airport measured an inch of snow and a low of 31, tying the earliest freeze. Three days from 101 to measurable snow is the shortest such gap on record, which is a statistic only Colorado would bother to keep and then mention at a cookout.

The average high for this date is about 83. Pack accordingly. The calendar will not help you. The mountains already know both versions of the week.

Sources: CBS Colorado — 14 records in six days · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 5 records · ThorntonWeather — Sept. 5 to 11 notes