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Benjamin Wadsworth, the man who invented Arvada

Contributed by: Michael Thompson on 6/22/2008

My name is Benjamin Franklin Wadsworth, and this is the story of how I invented Arvada.

I was born April 6, 1827 in Avon Springs New York. My father owned the springs that gave the place its name, and ran a bath house there, but it was becoming crowded as our family grew, so when I was ten years old, we moved to Mustcash Ohio. I was number eight of fourteen children born to my parents, Richard and Susan Wadsworth. And yes, we were distantly related to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous poet.

Mustcash was famous for its caves and mineral springs, and my father ran a spa there for people who believed the mineral water would cure their ailments. Perhaps it was from him that I got my enterpreneurial spirit.

As I was growing up in Ohio, I met many fine people, including Mary Ann Grove, who lived in a nearby town called Castalia, just south of Lake Erie. We got married on Halloween 1850 and had two children, John in 1851 and Mary Emma in 1854. John died at the age of 24, but Mary Emma married John P. Graves of Arvada in 1873 and they had seven children. How I did love to play with my grandchildren.

The grandchildren didn't come until after we'd moved to Colorado though. We'd heard about the big gold diggings and such in the area, so in 1859 we put the two children and our belongings in a covered wagon and started west. When we got here, it was silver mining that seemed to carry the most potential, so we settled in Empire, a center of activity. I made a good living buying and selling mining claims, and perhaps some money prospecting my own claim, and used some of the money to buy a farm from William Barranger at Ralston's Point, near Clear Creek. Barranger and his family continued to live there and paid me rent for the place.

In July of 1869 however, there was a great fire on Silver Mountain and it burned most of Empire to the ground. This used to happen regularly in mining towns, and in fact, Central City was burned down three times, and they always rebuilt it. I guess the people of Empire didn't think it was worthwhile though, and almost all of them left.

There's not much business buying and selling mining claims in a ghost town, so we moved down to the farm at Ralston's Point. The Barrangers had built a log cabin, so we lived there, and instead of mining claims, I decided to get into the land business and start a town.

Just to the west of my 160 acres was a similar farm, owned by a fellow named Louis Reno. We decided to get together and build a town where our two properties met. The property line became what we called Centre Street, right in the middle of town. Later, the people of the town named it after me, and nowadays it's called Olde Wadsworth. Not that I'm old mind you, but they had to keep it separate from the big Wadsworth Boulevard that was built later.

Louis and I mapped out a plan of the town called a "plat" and began to sell lots. I even gave two lots to William Graves to start a Blacksmith shop. I wanted to help our town grow, and I did all I could to support the Methodist Church, because I had been a loyal member for many years.

I was also a big supporter of education. They started a school on the Wolff homestead in 1863, but by 1869, it wasn't big enough any more, so I built a frame school house on my property, and helped organize a school board. That same year I was building a nice new brick house for my family, and later we gave some more lots and our log cabin to the school district.

We filed the plat with the state on December 1, 1870, and things really started to boom, because just at that same time, the Colorado Central Railroad reached the area. Before that, everyone had to go into Denver to get mail, but with the railroad, we could have our own Post Office. I applied to be the first Postmaster, but before we could start, it had to have a name. Some people suggested Ralston's Point, which is what the area had been called since Lewis Ralston discovered gold here in 1850, but there was already a Ralston Creek and we felt it should be something new and unique.

My wife's sister had married a fellow named Hiram Haskins, and they came out to Colorado from Ohio too. Hiram's middle name had been taken from the name of an island off the coast of Syria, which his mother found on a map in the old family Bible. It's said to mean "fruitful and growing" and that's what we wanted for our town, so we called it Arvada.

Now that we had a name, the Postal Service gave us approval, and the first Post Office in Arvada was a box with thirty cubbyholes in it, in my old log cabin. We had about that many families in Arvada, and around a hundred people total in 1870. I served as Postmaster until 1882, when Eli Allen took over. At first, the train would only slow down long enough to throw me the mail bag, but later, people from Arvada could ride into Denver, or up into the mountains as far as Black Hawk a few days a week.

Well, gold was what got Arvada started, but farming is what made it grow, and I made money buying and selling land, and helping business people get started in town. I was active in the Grange, which is an organization that supports agriculture. I remember in 1877 I looked over a lot of the farmers' fields, and discovered grasshopper eggs. We knew those would be a big problem the following spring, so we bought some coal oil to fight them with. We used a big sledge called a "hopperdozer" to do it. It had tanks filled with coal oil and a big screen behind them. As we dragged it through the field, it made the young hoppers jump up, so they'd hit the screen and fall into the coal oil, which is very bad for grasshoppers, but kept them from eating our crops.

I also continued to support the Methodist Church, and we started a great new building on land I donated in 1892. I also contributed some really beautiful stained glass windows, and during construction they were leaning up against the wall of the building. Some children were playing nearby and somehow one of the windows got broken.

Well, it was an accident, and you know how children are, but I wanted my gift to look nice when they installed those windows, so I loaded the broken one in my wagon, and took it into Denver one day, when I had to be in the city on business. I dropped it off at a glass repair place, and started down the street when a dog ran out of an alley and began barking fiercely.

Well this spooked my horse, and he shied and rared up, dragging the wagon onto the sidewalk which threw me out into the street. I hit my head and was knocked unconscious. They took me to the hospital, but I died two days later, on April 12, 1893.

I'm proud of what I did for my family, and my descendants in the Graves family are still around And I'm proud of what I did for my community. Maybe I didn't really "invent" Arvada, but I did a lot to get it started, and now it's the sixth largest city in Colorado, with over a hundred thousand people. Pretty good huh?

NOTE: This article is the script of a presentation I gave during the Gold Strike Festival in Arvada June 21, 2008. I drew material from a variety of sources, including publications of the Arvada Historical Society, Arvada Enterprise newspapers, and the collections of the Colorado Historical Society.


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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Michael Thompson

Arvada , CO

Michael Thompson has posted 16 stories and 2 comments since joining on 12/5/2005. Michael Thompson 's average story rating is 5.
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