The Johnstown Breeze has been publishing weekly news since 1904. It covers the northern Colorado communities of Johnstown and Milliken. Johnstown was founded in 1902, when Harvey J. Parish platted a town where nearly two decades before he had begun to farm.
The town got its name from his young son, John, who lay in a Denver hospital near death from a ruptured appendix when the community-creating was going on.
Asked what he’d name his new town, Parish replied, “It will be my son’s town. Let’s call it John’s Town.” Lore even has it that he went down to the hospital in Denver and told his sick son of his plan, and encouraged him to get better so he could come back to his new “home.”
One wonders, given the chances for survival from peritonitis in those days, if Parish didn’t secretly believe in his own breaking heart that at least his son’s memory would live on in the name of the new town. John Parish in fact rallied and returned to “John’s Town.” In the early 1930s, he would serve as its mayor.
The newspaper sits on the main street: Parish Avenue. Down the block there’s a McDonald’s on the exact spot where Harvey Parish set up his tent and began to farm. Some see that as a sign of success and progress. Others an omen of more ominous things.
The town is changing. This past fall, a decades-long project to fix a weird jog in the main intersection, at the only stoplight, finally was completed. The jog had been necessitated at the beginnings of the town, when one farmer could not be induced to part with a portion of his land for the road easement. The jigsaw intersection was something different.
COMMENTS (0)
RATE THIS STORY
