Antique 1921 Longmont Farmers Milling 🌾 Voucher Check

What Did a Colorado Mill Pay Farmers With? 🌾 Antique 1921 Longmont Farmers Milling Voucher Check

Size: 8 1/4" x 3 3/4"

Issued, paid and cancelled.

🌾 Longmont Farmers Mill Voucher Check, Denver Branch, "Pride of the Rockies"

What a handsome piece of old business paper! This is an antique voucher check from the Denver Branch of the Longmont farmers' milling company, drawn on the First National Bank of Denver, Colorado, with its accounts-payable voucher still attached. That was no small-town bank: Jerome B. Chaffee organized it, and it took national bank charter No. 1016 on May 10, 1865, the first national bank in the whole Intermountain West and for a long time one of the big financial houses of the American West. The company name sweeps across the top in big shaded display lettering, and at the left a round seal reads "PRIDE OF THE ROCKIES · FARMERS MILL PATENT · XXX" around a finely engraved picture of the mill itself, a tall brick building with a smokestack and a line of railroad cars alongside, under a spray of wheat. It's all printed on warm salmon-pink check stock.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• THE Longmont Farmers Milling and Elevator Co., DENVER BRANCH
• PRIDE OF THE ROCKIES · FARMERS MILL PATENT · XXX (the seal)
• Denver, Colo., ______ 191__, No. ____
• PAY TO THE ORDER OF, To First National Bank, Denver, Colo., Manager
• The voucher: ACCOUNTS PAYABLE WITH, YOUR INVOICE DATE, DESCRIPTION, AMOUNT OF INVOICE, DEDUCTIONS, NET AMOUNT, and "NO RECEIPT DESIRED. IF NOT CORRECT, RETURN THIS VOUCHER AT ONCE"
• SMITH-BROOKS CO. DENVER (the printer, in tiny type)

The date line is printed "191__," so the form itself was printed in the 1910s, and these were filled in, signed, paid and cancelled by the bank as the company used them. "Pride of the Rockies" was the mill's own flour, and "XXX" was the old millers' mark for their best grade.

🏭 The Pride of the Rockies Mill

This company was built to take on a giant. For decades J.K. Mullin's Colorado Milling and Elevator Co. held a virtual monopoly on flour in Colorado, shipping as far as California, Georgia and Massachusetts. In 1906 a group of his competitors banded together under the Longmont Farmers name and built a state-of-the-art mill complex off 20th Street in Denver's Platte Valley. They called it the Pride of the Rockies, and Mullin's biographer Bill Convery calls it "a big rock in his garden." It had three silos, was one of the first plants in town wired for electricity, and at its height it milled 250,000 bushels of grain a year. (Longmont's farmers had milled together for a long time; a Farmer's Milling and Elevator Company cooperative was founded in Longmont back in 1886.)

Flour dust is a fire waiting to happen, and the plant burned twice, in 1920 and again in 1932. The 1932 blaze was so fierce that Denver passed an ordinance forbidding anyone to salvage or resell the mill's charred equipment. The mill was rebuilt, bought by Mullin himself, and later sold to one of the big Eastern flour companies. The 1920 mill building and three storage bins are all that survive of the complex, the last of their kind from Denver's flour-milling days; it went on the National Register of Historic Places on December 7, 1995, and it's the Flour Mill Lofts at 2100 20th Street today. In the years it stood empty, the old mill picked up more than its share of spooky local legends, the kind every abandoned building in a city seems to collect.

🏡 Display

It's a great little piece framed in a kitchen, a bakery or an office, and a perfect gift for anybody from Longmont or Denver, a baker, or a check and banking collector.