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Show Boulder Readies Centennial Event The town of Boulder will reach its 100th anniversary on June 22 but residents will reserve their real celebrating for July 4. Although William Bowns, John King, George Ormond, George Baker, and Joseph Robinson began grazing cattle and horses in the area and William Mecks started a summer dairy operation on the mountain in 1887, the firs! real settlers arrived in Boulder June 22, 1889, when Amasa Lyman and George Baker brought their families and bachelor Sam Sheffield joined them to establish their homes in Boulder. Sheffield remained to become the first person ever buried in the little town's cemetery. Three roads into the community were started in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, with the last completed June 21, 1940. The first road was into the community in 1971, although lots of people, when traveling by horseback, took the 12-mile shortcut through Death Hollow, much too precarious for any vehicle. The town's first school was built in 1896, a log cabin for 19 students and their teacher, John Houston. By 1913 the town had grown and there were two teachers. The first regular mail delivery into the remote community began by mule in 1906 with James Schow making the trip twice a week. The town's first postmaster was Minnie Haws and Haws is still a familiar family name in the town. The last mule delivery of mail was made in 1938 by the fathcr-and-son team of Arthur and Cecil Alvey. In 1925 the first automobile arrived in Boulder, and by 1933, when construction on the first three roads into town was begun, there were eight. History fails to record how they got there. The old school burned down in 1935, and the schoolhouse built to replace it, still in use today, is on the federal historical register. Sue Bassctt teaches today in the one-room schoolhouse. In 1965, the school was disbanded, with students bused to Escalante until 1985 when the number of elementary age students in town justified its reopening. The population of the little town was varied over the years. Many of the original family names are still to be found in town, but today's families run substantially smaller. There are Hawses, Petersons, Halls, Osborncs, Ogdens, Kings, Moosmans, Hanscns and Colemans, say Mayor Donna Wilson, who has tried to reach all former residents to invite them to the July 4th birthday party planned as an all-day outdoor celebration. It'll take quite a celebration, she said, to equal the special one on Christmas Eve 1947 when electricity first arrived in Boulder. She expects much more history to be recalled when everybody gets together July 4. |