The Boston Company

The Boston Company. . Seven members of the Boston Mechanics’ Mining and Trading Company, namely George West (President), Walter Pollard, James MacDonald (Business manager), Mark Leonardo Blunt (later Postmaster), James McIntyre, Lawrence Panton, and Joseph T. Bird arrived in Golden on June 12, 1859. They remained, out of a much larger party who had come from Boston, and had passed through Missouri in April. Having arrived in Denver on June 10, they stayed for two days to help the Rocky Mountain News get out its first “Extra Edition,” which reported on the new Gregory Gold Discoveries whose news Horace Greeley had just brought back from the fledgling gold fields., The party had been larger when leaving Boston. However, the other Boston Company members lost faith and returned east before arriving in the front range. Mountain Charley later described the burn back: “I remember seeing your outfit on Little Blue, where you divided up with your back-sliding partners to see them return to the river with ‘Pike’s Peak or Bust’ replaced by ‘Busted’ on their wagon sheets.” The Boston Company arrived in the Golden valley on June 12, 1859, camping where the west end of the Golden Hotel stands today. Four days later they and others, who were camped out in this valley, agreed to form the new town of Golden City, creating the Golden City Association town company to run it., The Boston Company set up business in it tnt and on July 4, 1859 the company laid the cornerstone for Golden’s first building at today’s Parfet Park. The cornerstone contained “a copper cent and two-cent of the mintage of 1858, a pair of scissors, a table fork, tea spoon, a steel bit, an ox shoe, and a horse shoe.” Upon this cornerstone rose an unusually impressive structure for a town’s first building, a two-story building of hewn logs taken from Clear Creek Canyon, made in the Saltbox style of their New England homes. Joseph T. Bird made the windows, crafted from 10”x12” pans of glass brought across the plains in the company’s ox wagon. The Boston Company ran a general mercantile and trading business, as well as an express and stage business., In December 1859, George West established Golden’s first newspaper the Western Mountaineer, in the upper floor of the Boston Company. The Mountaineer’s staff included noted eastern editors Albert D. Richardson and Thomas W. Knox. Richardson, a correspondent of the Boston Atlas and Bee, was nicknamed the Religious Editor. Knox, of the New York Herald, became the Military Editor. Blunt was the Matrimonial Editor. Also on staff were Mrs. Joslin, Intermediate Editor, and E.H.N. “Sniktau” Patterson, roving reporter. Company members slept on cots inside the building., George West served as a Union Captain in the Civil War. In 1866 he returned to Golden and started the Colorado Transcript in the same building. He ran the paper for 40 years until his death. The Boston Company continued until 1860. Then the Company was reorganized as West, Blunt and Co. and went out of business at the end of 1860. The building became Golden City Pottery; afterward, a private home. It was critically damaged in the Great Flood of 1896, but John Nicholls, upon hearing of its historic value, resolved to restore it, among the earliest known preservation efforts in Colorado. It was moved to nearby Pleasant View west of the Rock Rest in 1925 and burned in 1946. The Boston Company’s diary and a window from the building still survive at the Colorado Historical Society.