Organizations
Collection for organization entities.
Pages
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- Grand Junction Lions Club (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- A local chapter of the international organization created by attorney Silmon Smith, M.N. Due, Bob Ross, and man named Jones in 1921. According to Lion Laird Smith, the club briefly disbanded when Walter Walker brought the Rotary Club to town. In 1922, the Grand Junction Lions Club reformed with Silmon Smith as president (Laird's father). According to Silmon Smith, because he and others had not been offered membership in the Rotary Club, he and other former Lions, “picked out about 20 of the leading young men in town and invited them to meet with us and we’d form a Lions Club. And they all accepted with the exception of one.” In a speech given shortly before his death in 1964, Silmon Smith described the first service projects performed by the Grand Junction Lions: "When we came across this word, ‘service’, that our district governor has mentioned, we didn’t know how to begin serving. It was a new deal. And we happened to think of this little, nice, little spot up on Kannah Creek, just below the intake where there were vines and shrubs and a little poison ivy and spiders and what-have-you. We decided to go up there and clean that up. And we were full of vim and vigor and we divided ourselves up into teams – you and I would go and we’d clean this place up and we’d get all through and then we’d go clean up the place that you got through cleaning up and the other one… and by the time we got that cleaned up, we had the place completely ruined. Lion Leland Schmidt’s father was one of the most avid cleaners. People up at Kannah Creek saw that we were all hot and bothered to do something and they began to figure out “What do we want?” They decided that they wanted a bridge, so they came down and said, “Will you, please, build us a bridge?” So we put the heat on the county commissioners to build a bridge, which they did. Presently, somebody thought about a junior college. We started in to talk about a junior college. We were a little bit thrown off the gait for a while because some man – and I think he was a legislator from Colorado – told us that the Western State College up here at Gunnison… that darned cold place up there… could be better moved down to Grand Junction and instead of having a junior college, we’d have a four-year college. Some of the people swallowed that idea, and so we started to move Western State from Gunnison to Grand Junction. Do you know those people up there in Gunnison didn’t like that? And whether the Lion’s Club had any part in that, I don’t know, but this district did. At any rate, we didn’t move it down." The club conducts various activities, including the Lions Club Carnival, first organized in the 1940's. Before the Carnival, the Lions put on a Lions Follies at the Avalon Theater, with members dressing up in costume, pantomiming and dancing. They first met in the LaCourt Hotel, owned by William Buthorn. The first carnival was organized and promoted by B.M. Benge. It netted $300. The Lions Club used its carnival as a vehicle to fundraise for Grand Junction Junior College, for teacher salaries, the early school building, and even for scholarships. Members of the Lions Club, including Orlo Williams, went to neighboring towns and persuaded townspeople to sponsor scholarships in turn for a Lions Club contribution of matching funds. According to Al Look, the club funded many important projects over the years, including: Construction of a road from the Kannah Creek Reservoir, building the road to Land’s End, the early Mesa College, a playground at Lincoln Park, and the establishment of a dance club for high school students. The Lions also raised $90,000 to help start Two Rivers Plaza (now the Grand Junction Convention Center), and $90,000 to help build the Moss Performing Arts Center at Mesa College (now Colorado Mesa University).
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- Grand Junction New Castle Stage (Colorado)
- Stage coach line that ran from Grand Junction to New Castle in the late 19th century.
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- Grand Junction News (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- A Republican Party affiliated newspaper and Grand Junction's first newspaper. It was established in 1882 by owner and publisher Edwin Price, who hired Darwin P. Kingsley as editor in 1882. Kingsley later became the president of the New York Life Insurance Company. Price published the paper into the early Twentieth century, when he was joined by a partner named Newton. Charlie Adams ultimately purchased the paper and sold it to The Daily Sentinel in the 1920's. Adams then purchased The Delta Independent and the Sentinel's old press to run it with.
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- Grand Junction Police Department (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- According to author Ruth Moss, the first marshal of the department was James “Jim” Davis, hired in 1881 or 1882 and employed until 1883. According to Moss, “[around 1906] in the city, the law enforcement staff had risen to three, Marshal Charles H. Wallis and two patrolmen. One of them was the wellknown officer, Andy Halligan. In 1909, the city adopted the commission form of government and the first actual police department came into being. It was administered under the commissioner of public affairs and had G. Burdette Welch as its chief” (Mesa County Historical Society newsletter, May-June 1983).
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- Grand Junction Public Library (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- While it is not known what became of Grand Junction’s first attempt to organize a public library (a meeting of the Grand Junction Library Association in January 1883), we do know that an effort in 1897 was successful. When Grand Junction was sixteen years old, members of two women’s clubs, the Grand Mesa Club and the Grand Junction Womens Club, united as the Woman’s Library Association in 1894. The goal of the association was to establish a free public library. They attempted to raise funds by sending a plea for money home with students, but money was slow to come in. They were able to purchase 900 volumes over a few years. In 1898, the association opened a subscription library with these volumes that was open to “anyone whose morals were unquestionably good”. By 1900, the association had received a promise from Andrew Carnegie to donate $5,000 for a library building, with the usual stipulation that funds be secured for the on-going support and maintenance of the library. The ladies lobbied the city council and, in due course, members of the council pledged $1,200 a year to support a library. A site was chosen on the corner of 7th and Grand, and the grand opening of the Grand Junction Public Library (GJPL) was held on July 5, 1901. The Women’s Library Association turned its books and property over to the public library, and the members promptly voted the association out of existence. The Grand Junction Public Library developed steadily, and the citizens of Grand Junction were well served. Residents of Mesa County who lived outside of the city limits, however, were charged a fee for services. Interestingly, the records show that GJPL did operate a branch library in the Riverside School and gave free library service to the Redlands area from 1923 to 1938. In the 1930s, the main library outgrew the Carnegie building. In 1938, federal Public Works Administration funds were used to construct a new building on the corner of 5th and White. The library was to remain in this building for the next thirty-six years. During the 1950s and 1960s, many people recognized that there would be value in combining the city and county libraries. In order to accomplish this, state legislators from Mesa County sponsored legislation to make it possible for counties to assess up to 1.5 mills for the operation of libraries. In 1967, the city and Mesa College agreed to turn over all the books and library property they owned to Mesa County. Mesa County agreed to assess a property tax to support the library, and to take the library on as a county department. The newly consolidated Mesa County Public Library continued to operate from both the old MCPL location at 616 North Avenue, and the old GJPL location at 521 White Avenue.
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- Grand Junction Regional Center (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- The building complex, which originally housed the Teller Institute, a boarding school for American Indians, was built in 1885. In 1921, ten years after the closure of the Teller Institute, the buildings housed what was known as the State Home for Mental Defectives. The name was changed to the State Home and Training School and then the Grand Junction Regional Center in the 1970s. In its early days, the State Home was led by a Dr. Jefferson (according to David Sundal in his oral history interview). Jefferson was a "courtly Southern gentleman" who had been appointed by President Roosevelt as the American ambassador to Nicaragua in 1915.
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- Grand Junction Rotary Club (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- A social and charitable organization founded in part by Walter Walker, publisher of The Daily Sentinel newspaper. According to Grand Junction Lions Club founder Silmon Smith, the Rotary Club came into existence when the original Grand Junction Lions Club folded in 1922, with some Lions members joining the Rotary. According to William "Bill" Rump, whose father Charles Rump was a charter member, the Grand Junction Rotary was an early proponent of changing the Grand River's name to the Colorado River, and lobbied politically for the change.
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- Grand Junction School District 1 (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- A district that began in 1883, shortly after the formation of Mesa County from territory that had previously belonged to Gunnison County. Previous to the official creation of the district, the first school board was elected on June 1, 1882, before the Grand Junction City Government had even been elected. Harrison Edward Stroud, W.M. McKelvey, and O.D. Russell were members of the first board. Stroud served as the superintendent of schools (1881). The board governed the first school in the Grand Valley, which was built between 4th and 5th Streets on the south side of Colorado Avenue in 1881. The district grew to govern several schools in the Grand Junction area, including Grand Junction High School. In 1950, it became part of Mesa County Valley School District 51, which merged the many small districts of Mesa County (with the exception of De Beque and Plateau Valley). *This description takes information from the book "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 Town Company (Grand Junction, Colorado)
- The Town Company governed and funded the creation and construction of Grand Junction and its government prior to the town's incorporation. According to the Grand Junction News, the Town Company filed articles of incorporation sometime in December 1882. Its organizer was George Crawford, who had the Town Company offices and the first town hall built at the corner of 7th and Main Streets (an adobe building on the site of what is now the Avalon Theater). The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad owned half of the Town Company's stock, and so wielded considerable clout in early town politics. Even after the creation of the town's city council, the Town Company continued to fund and control aspects of the town's construction, including the building of houses to encourage settlement farther afield from the downtown core. When it was established in 1883, it was resolved that the company would exist for at least twenty years. It exceeded that goal. In 1883, attorney Thomas B. Crawford was authorized by the city council to sell and convey land or real estate to be managed by the Grand Junction Town Company for the benefit of the town. This arrangement led to a sometimes power struggle between the city and the Town Company.