Colorado history

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Denver gives itself a day off to look at six-foot grass, a Denver baby grows into the world's fastest human with tape on his glasses, and September files the coldest morning it has ever admitted.

The mayor declares a holiday so Denver can go look at cheese

1876 · East Denver fairgrounds

On Friday, Sept. 29, 1876, Mayor R. G. Buckingham declared an official city holiday so bankers, clerks, and anyone with a wagon could ride out to the Colorado Industrial Association's first post-statehood fair. The grandstand filled before the horses were even announced.

The fair had opened Tuesday on forty acres at the city's east edge — the same exposition the Industrial Association had been staging since the 1860s, now wearing Centennial-State clothes. Fifty petitioners from the banks and the shops asked the mayor for a day off. Buckingham obliged, "with a view to the encouragement of a project which, if properly furthered, will inure to the benefit of the entire community." That is 1876 for: please go look at the beets.

The Rocky Mountain News said every means of transportation in the city was pressed into service. By one o'clock Friday the grandstand had no sitting room and almost no standing room, though the races were not due until two. Tempest and Bay Billy had already taken the Tuesday purses, $150 apiece. Next door at Ford's Park, forty shooters contested prizes that ran from $100 cash to a sack of flour. Clear Creek Valley Grange sent mammoth squashes, beets, potatoes, melons, and freshly cut grass measuring over six feet. The El Paso County Cheese Company sent, the paper said, enough cheese to surfeit the whole state.

There were rare exotics in pots, fancy needlework, oil paintings, tanned hides, luxury furniture, and some excellent articles in the plumbing line. The News blamed two kinds of pride: the first fair since statehood, and the national kind that comes with a Centennial year. Pueblo would later keep the State Fair. Denver kept the memory of a Friday when the whole new state seemed to be standing in one grandstand, waiting for a horse.

If you needed a civic excuse to leave the desk, this was the original one. Bring a wagon. Watch the cheese.

Sources: Colorado Newsline — 1876 Denver first state fair · Denver Visitor — Sept. 26, 1876 fair opening

Eddie Tolan is born in Denver, then tapes his glasses on and outruns the century

1908 · Denver, then Detroit and Los Angeles

Thomas Edward Tolan was born in Denver on Sept. 29, 1908. He left as a child, learned to sprint in Detroit with horn-rims taped to his temples, and at the 1932 Los Angeles Games became the first Black athlete to win two Olympic golds — and the first non-white sprinter the papers called the world's fastest human.

The draft card and the Olympic register keep the Denver date. The family did not stay. Salt Lake City came first, then Detroit in 1924, when Eddie was fifteen and his father had read that the jobs for Black families were better there. Cass Tech got a football player who could also run. Michigan got the runner after a knee and a locker-room vote steered him off the freshman football roster and onto the track.

He was not tall. Accounts wander between 5-foot-4-and-a-half and 5-foot-7. He chewed gum in time with his stride, wrapped an old football knee, and taped the spectacles so they would not fall off — twice they had, and a nearsighted man cannot win what he cannot see. In 1929 he ran 9.5 for 100 yards. The papers named him the Midnight Express and then spent a lot of ink on the glasses, the build, and the race.

Los Angeles, 1932: Ralph Metcalfe had beaten him at the trials in both sprints. In the Olympic 100 the two of them hit the tape together. The camera gave Tolan the lean, 10.3, a world-record tie. The 200 was not close. 21.2, Olympic record, second gold. Jesse Owens later said Eddie and Ralph were the high-school idols. Four years later Owens would take four golds in Berlin. Tolan had already moved the line.

The amateur rules caught up after vaudeville dates with Bill Robinson. He clerked, ran professionally in Melbourne in 1935, checked materials at Packard in the war, taught gym at Irving Elementary in Detroit, and died there on Jan. 30, 1967, during dialysis, at 58. Career ledger: about 300 wins, seven losses. The birth certificate stayed in Denver. The tape on the glasses did the rest.

Sources: Wikipedia — Eddie Tolan · Olympedia — Eddie Tolan · U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum · USA Track & Field — Eddie Tolan

September's coldest morning is this one, and the date also keeps 8.2 inches and 92 degrees

1985 · Denver

On the morning of Sept. 29, 1985, Denver fell to 17 degrees — still the lowest temperature ever recorded in September. The high that day was 29, the all-time record low maximum for the month. The same square on the calendar once measured 8.2 inches of snow and, in 2024, a 92-degree afternoon.

The cold arrived with company. Metro Denver had just taken 8 to 12 inches of powder. I-70 closed west of town for a stretch. Flights at Stapleton slipped more than two hours. Limbs came down on still-leafed trees and 10,000 people in Boulder sat in the dark. The official low of 17 on this morning remains the September floor. The official high of 29 is the month's stingiest afternoon. The evening of the 28th had already set a 21-degree mark. Record cold hung around through Oct. 1.

Twenty-six years earlier the date did the snow version. Rain on the 28th of 1959 turned to heavy wet snow overnight. Stapleton measured 8.2 inches on the 29th alone — still the date record — and 10.6 for the storm, 12.9 for the month. Trees in full leaf snapped. One man in Denver was killed by a falling limb; four others died of heart attacks on the shovel or the branches. Cleanup across eastern Colorado ran past half a million 1959 dollars. The trees themselves were valued over five million.

The date also practices the other extreme. In 1966 a cold front dropped the city from 86 to 46 with north gusts to 51 and blowing dust that cut Stapleton's visibility to a mile. In 1994 the high hit 91. In 2024 it hit 92, the date record, with a 61-degree low that was the warmest minimum on the books. Wettest liquid day: 1.01 inches in 2014. Average high is about 73.

Pack the layer you can peel. This square has already been midwinter before breakfast, a tree-wrecking snow day, a dust afternoon, and a short-sleeve 92. September does not apologize. It just files the reading.

Sources: NWS Boulder public information statement · ThorntonWeather — Sept. 29 to Oct. 5 · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 29 · Denver7 — September weather