Overhead view of a magnifying glass over the word "history."

Denver’s 1876 municipal election shaped a fast-growing frontier city

Chase Woodruff

(Colorado Newsline)

In the Colorado Territory, the first Monday in April was reserved for municipal elections, and in 1876 none were more closely watched than the contests in the territorial capital.

Democrats had gained control of Denver’s municipal government two years earlier, ending a long period of Republican dominance. But with Colorado’s constitutional convention now adjourned, and the probability of its first state elections looming later in the centennial year, the April vote was an important test of the GOP’s revived electoral fortunes.

The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s leading Republican newspaper, feared “how much prestige it would give the Democrats in next fall’s election, (if) they carry the chief city in the territory this spring.”

Fingers holding a pencil over an election ballot showing yes and no options

A vote for the Republican ticket, in the News’ view, was a vote for “economy and not extravagance” in city affairs. The city’s budget had swelled to $170,000, it reported, in the fiscal year ending in 1876.

“The Democrats have tried their hand at running the city and they have run it into debt, if not into the ground,” the News declared on April 2. “Let the Republicans have their turn.”

Without a doubt, Denver’s government had swollen in size and complexity in the preceding years. Now home to a fast-growing population of roughly 20,000 people, its days as a rough-and-ready pioneer settlement were fading into memory.

Its municipal charter, as amended by the territorial Legislature in early 1876, authorized the collection of taxes to fund its “police department, fire department, water for irrigation and fire purposes, lighting the streets of the city, city officers’ salaries, street improvements, bridges, and contingent expenses.”

City government consisted of a 12-seat board of aldermen, with two aldermen representing each of six city wards. Elections were held annually, with aldermen serving staggered two-year terms. A mayor elected citywide presided over the council, broke ties when needed and oversaw the enforcement of all city ordinances as head of its police force. By 1878 Denver’s full-time workforce would include a city attorney, multiple civil engineers, a street supervisor, a city physician, a city ashman to dispose of the contents of “ash cans and private ash vaults,” and a city scavenger, charged with “removing bodies of dead animals and filth of every description.”

Public services

From 1869 onward, the most controversial issues in Denver municipal politics had to do with its public service corporations — exclusive franchises given to private companies to furnish the city with gas for street lamps and home lighting fixtures, its horse-drawn streetcar railway, water from a new hydraulic pumping station on the Platte River and more.

The most notorious of these franchises belonged to the Denver Gas Company, which was granted a 50-year monopoly over the “manufacture and distribution of illuminating gas” throughout the city. After extensive pipe-laying work, it began service in January 1871, offering fuel gas, typically manufactured from coal, to customers at a price of $5 per thousand cubic feet.

“And what did the gas company give for this exclusive right to capitalize for fifty years the needs of a rapidly growing city, the center of a vast region certain of its minerals and harvests?” wrote historian Clyde Lyndon King in a 1911 treatise on Denver’s public service corporations. “No remuneration was demanded and, of course, none was offered; no provisions were inserted as to extensions; no reservations as to future control of rates or services were asked for and none were made.”

Investors in the Denver Gas Company included Rocky Mountain News publisher William Byers and other prominent early Denverites like Walter Scott Cheesman, David Moffat and former territorial Governor John Evans — many of whom also controlled the Denver City Water Company, incorporated in 1870.

In the final decades of the 19th century, these local monopolies, along with national railroad corporations, found themselves under scrutiny as major engines of Gilded Age corruption, accused of fleecing the public through a combination of high rates, massive tax exemptions and other privileges. Calls for reform would eventually lead to the creation of a Public Utilities Commission in Colorado and many other states. In 1923, the former Denver Gas Company merged with other gas and electric utilities to become the Public Service Company of Colorado, owned and operated today by Xcel Energy.

An inconclusive election

The highest hopes of Denver’s Republican establishment were dashed on election day, April 3, 1876. R.G. Buckingham, a physician and the Democratic candidate for mayor, won a narrow victory with 1,507 votes to the 1,328 won by his Republican opponent. The GOP consoled itself with a resounding win in the race for city treasurer, and with the capture of enough alderman seats for a city council majority.

Colorado owed its potential admission to the union as the 38th state to partisan maneuvering by national Republicans, who wanted the state’s three electoral votes in what was widely expected to be a close 1876 presidential election. An economic downturn that followed the Panic of 1873, combined with a rash of corruption scandals plaguing President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, had helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in the 1874 midterms for the first time since the Civil War.

Municipal results in Denver were another sign that electoral politics in Colorado would remain closely contested throughout the centennial year. Ahead of the election, the News had even speculated that a Democratic victory might prevent Grant from proclaiming Colorado a state that summer after all, ending “the chance of participation in the presidential contest.” Democrats, meanwhile, were jubilant.

“At 9 o’clock last night the Democrats heralded the victorious current of affairs — victorious for them — by starting a bonfire in front of Leichsenring’s saloon, on Holladay Street,” the News reported, “and shouting themselves hoarse, which demonstration was supplemented later in the evening by serenading exercises.”