Longmont
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The City of Longmont is a home rule municipality located in Boulder County and Weld County, Colorado, United States. Longmont is the 13th most populous city in the State of Colorado. The word “Longmont” comes from Longs Peak, a prominent mountain named for explorer Stephen H. Long that is clearly visible from Longmont, and “mont” from the French word for mountain. The city is located northeast of the county seat of Boulder. In contrast to its better-known neighbor, Longmont has a much more quiet and residential feel, although the city has begun to grow rapidly in recent years, in part as a bedroom community to the more-expensive Boulder and to nearby Denver.
Also notable, Longmont was declared an “All-America City” by the National Civic League in June 2006. The city was also named number 61 on the 2006 list of the top 100 places to live in the United States by Money Magazine.
Longmont was founded in 1871 by a group of Chicagoans who had decided to found a new town in Colorado. Originally called the Chicago-Colorado Colony, the men sold memberships in the town and with the proceeds purchased the land necessary for the town. As the first planned community in Boulder County, the city streets were laid out in a grid plan in a square mile. The city began to flourish as an agricultural community after the building of the Colorado Central Railroad line arrived northward from Boulder in 1877. In the 1940s the city began to grow beyond these original limits. In the 1960s the federal government located an air-traffic control center in town and IBM built a large plant near the city. As agriculture waned, more high technology has come to the city especially in the computer hard drive industry including companies like Seagate and Maxtor. The downtown along Main Street, once nearly dead during the 1980s, has seen a vibrant revival in the last decade. In the mid 1990s, the south edge of the city became the location of the first New Urbanist project in Colorado, called Prospect New Town, designed by renowned architect Andres Duany.