Fort Collins Stories

What is it about kindergarten that makes it so memorable? I vividly remember my kindergarten days, but they weren’t quite like these. (Today’s stories are excerpts from “Talking About Fort Collins: Selections from Oral Histories,” a joint project of The Friends of the Library and the Local History Department of the Fort Collins Public Library (1992). Transcripts of the oral histories are also available at Fort Collins History Connection. )

“Fort Collins was a small town; we knew everybody in the schools and in the town. And we had good schools from the start. The first kindergarten west of the Mississippi River was started here in 1880 by Judge Jay Bouton.

I started to school in the Remington school building when I was four years old. They let us go at four and five years, so I went two years to kindergarten. I remember the school bell on a rope. The janitor would let me hang onto the rope and go up and down with the rope from the school bell. The Presbyterian Church was right across from the school, and when Auntie Stone died—she was almost a hundred years old—they tolled the bell, very slowly. That bell rang for about a hundred times. I never did forget that.”
--Edith Bair, 1975

“In the early 1900s, I went to kindergarten in the basement of the Remington School and when I failed to show up for class, my teacher would call my mother and tell her I wasn’t in school. Mother would hitch up her buggy and drive downtown to the harness shop—the leather shop where they were making saddles and harnesses. She would either find me there or across the street at the shoeing shop. She would take me by the ear and lead me out and set me in that buggy and drive me to school and set me in my seat.”
--Jay H. Bouton III, 1972

Mystery Photo
Last week's photo was the Northside Aztlan Center (way to go, Kerrie!)




















Where in Fort Collins was this (seasonal) picture taken?