I’ve always liked history. It’s the closest thing I could get to more English classes in school after I’d already had English for the day, since both were basically about stories: The telling of them and why they’re important, with the only difference being that one was made up and sometimes had lasers (Thanks, Ender’s Game) and the other doesn’t usually get told as a story, thus giving it a bad rap in life.
However, we all know our education system, strained and trying its best as it is, is flawed, in that the version of history it teaches tends to be white-washed and never gets past the Cold War in an entire year. Seriously. What happened in the 70s through the 90s? I don’t know, the best I can figure out from memes is that Battle Toads existed, the Vietnam War happened, Woodstock was a thing and so were frosted tips. Probably. Or maybe that was the 2000s, I have no idea. But that’s besides the point. While my education covered the white-cream version of American and world history, I have typically known next to nothing about the local history of the places where I’ve lived.
While my history in Fort Collins may only go back a few years, for others, their roots in this town go back for almost a century. Fort Collins started out as a pioneering town based around a military fort, which gave it its moniker of Fort Collins. Although it was a solid trade hub and worked as a ‘gateway to the mountains’ there wasn’t a lot that Fort Collins was ‘putting out’ economically. I mean export-wise; get your mind out of the gutter.
This was true until the very late 1800s, when sugar beets became a highly lucrative cash crop for the Fort Collins area. This was great for Fort Collins and brought the town a lot of prosperity in the agricultural industry, allowing the city to grow and helping to make us to the college-town hub we are today. But the sugar beet crops and the resulting factories wouldn’t have boomed as much as they did without several groups of people: The Mexican, Chicano and German immigrants who worked the fields and processed the produce into sugar.
As is the truth in much of agriculture, the labor necessary to maintain the sugar beets was back-breaking and long, calling for hours that stretched from sunrise to sunset. The workers themselves spent these hours hunched over waving green fronds due to how they were required to use short-handled hoes to avoid damaging the plants. These tools also made it easy for supervisors to spot anyone taking breaks as they rose to stretch their backs. But in spite of the travails brought on by the sugar beet fields, the communities formed by the immigrants who came to work in them became large neighborhoods in Fort Collins today, such as Andersonville, Alta Vista and Buckingham.
Again, as is the truth in much of American history, these immigrants don’t get nearly enough credit for the work they did to bring Fort Collins to prosperity. But now, the Fort Collins branch of the BIPOC Alliance is working to help fund a new monument that’s going to go in Sugar Beet Park which will honor the impact these underserved communities have had on the city. The brass sculpture is going to feature the hand-held hoe that the sugar beet workers used to cultivate the fields, and the bricks the statue will rest on will feature the engraved names of historical beet workers and Hispanic and Latinx community leaders.
Right now, the Alliance is still fundraising to get the bricks on the base of this statue engraved with the names of the communities they’d most like to recognize. You can donate to this effort here to ensure that FoCo’s local history doesn’t leave behind those who carried it on their shoulders, made us economically prosperous and created thriving communities that changed the cultural makeup of Fort Collins.
