Future visitors to the Fort Lupton museum will be missing a big part of the town’s history, now that curator Nancy Penfold has retired.
A fixture at the museum for decades, Penfold carries as much local history inside her head as the building holds within its walls. Maybe even a little bit more, considering her family’s longevity as historians in Fort Lupton.
While health concerns were the deciding issue behind her stepping down, Penfold said retirement had been on her mind for some time now.
“I’ve been thinking about retiring for a couple years anyway, because it’s time. I’m going to be 85 next month,” Penfold said.
“You need new blood, and I’ve been there for about a hundred years anyway,” she added, laughing.
Perhaps not for the full hundred years, but for as long as most remember, Penfold has been the voice of the city’s past and the keeper of Fort Lupton’s most treasured artifacts. It’s a job she was born to, passed down from her mother and picked up when the city needed someone to care for the legacy of Fort Lupton.
“I started as city historian in ’75,” Penfold said. “The city had to have a historian if they wanted to get in on grants for the (state) centennial and the (national) bicentennial. They appointed me historian because I had been brought up with history. My mother was a historian and I had been brought up with Fort Lupton history.”
Penfold said that in the early 1980s, when construction was complete on the new City Hall building on McKinley Avenue, the museum occupied what are now the city finance offices. “Then in 1992, they moved us over into the (old) library, because we had consolidated our city library with our high school library.”
She knew the location was safe from the wrecking ball, because the historic building went up in 1929 in keeping with that era’s nationwide Carnegie model, if not his funding. (Carnegie libraries were usually built with money donated by businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. More than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built, including 1,689 structures in the U.S. At the time, nearly half of all libraries in the U.S. were Carnegie libraries. Ed.)
“Carnegie didn’t build it, but they used his plan,” Penfold explained. “The local club ladies raised money for about three years to build that library. Before that, the library was in a dentist’s office in town.”
Helping raise the $8,000 stake to build the library was Thursday Afternoon Club member Ruby Frink-Davis, Penfold’s mother, with history of her own. The Frinks arrived in Fort Lupton in 1895, starting the historic Fort Lupton Canning Factory not long after. Built upon the site of former Silver State Creamery, the canning company celebrated the town in 1909 with a barbecue, tomato fights, dancing and a parade. That celebration grew into Trapper Days, another historic link to the city.
Nancy’s grandfather, W.H. Davis, came to Denver in the 1870s, enroute to the California gold rush. After breaking a leg, he chose to stay in Denver and became a land developer, renovating farms and reselling them. One of those farms went to Penfold’s father, Ernie B. Davis, who met Ruby picking strawberries on the farm that the pair eventually raised Penfold and her siblings on. Nancy, baby of the Davis clan, came along in 1926.
“My father and mother both were active in the community,” Penfold said of her philanthropic roots.
“My mother was an invalid by the time I was 12, but she was still active, she was what my father called a “do-gooder.”
It was a sign of the times indicative of her family’s character.
“This was before Social Security and old age pensions and everything,” Penfold explained. “You had to help people. Growing up, this was our town, and you did what you could for your town.”
Along the way, Penfold has done just that, first raising a family she is rightly proud of with husband Bud of 65 years, then working in service to the community in one form or another her entire life — first as a rural mail carrier in Fort Lupton, then in the employ of Weld County Mental Health Services, a job she excelled at and loved for 15 years. Still in the community, she worked for Dr. Irene Holloman, a dentist in Fort Lupton, before finally coming on the city payroll in 1992 as a paid employee of the museum.
“They just started paying me. I worked the first 20 years at the city without pay,” Penfold said, laughing at the memory. “We moved over to the old Library. One of the deals when we moved was that they would be open five days a week.”
She’s been there ever since, right up until retiring. She has also been on “just about every committee the city has,” and remains on both the historic preservation board and the cemetery committee. Her dedication to community, state and national causes garnered attention from outside the town, and she has many awards.
In 2004, she received high accolades from the state, representing Colorado older workers in Washington, D.C., for Experience Works, a community-based national organization that helps older adults get training and placement for decent jobs within the community.
“It was wonderful. I was treated like a queen,” Penfold said.
The award was just one of a string Penfold has received through the years, including a 1976 honor as Outstanding Citizen of Fort Lupton, 1982 and 1985 nods from the Greeley Tribune’s yearly Panorama series about people who make a difference in Weld County, 1985 Outstanding Weld County Woman, top honors at Trapper Days in 1987, and in 2003, Penfold won the Everett Hogelin Memorial Award, given by the Fort Lupton Fire Department to honor the year’s outstanding citizen.
The honors are no surprise to niece Marlene Steiber.
“She’s been in the community her whole life, and loves people, as did her mom,” Steiber said “Her mom and dad were both very active in the community, and I think that’s what got her started.”
“It just kind of evolved in the 70’s, when she became town historian, and then in 1976 she was in charge of the celebration,” Steiber recalled. “The city had a play, and a big to-do. Fort Lupton city council asked her/coerced her into taking on this lovely play that Odessa Anderson had written, and it was a masterpiece. There were Dutch hops and German songs and English and Indians. Just the whole conglomeration of what made Fort Lupton. Just a masterpiece.”
DebraRay Thompson, who took over supervision of the museum in early November, was a museum volunteer before the retirement and is still a good friend of Penfold’s, going back some 18 years. The friendship proved fortuitous when the time came for Penfold to step down.
“They (city officials) needed someone who had connection with the community, someone who spent time with Nancy listening to the historical stories, somebody who had a love of history and the museum,” Thompson said. “So they hired me, for that reason.”
Thompson’s nomination came from several members of the community as well as Penfold herself and members of the South Platte Valley Historical Society.
Thompson noted that Penfold’s most enduring legacy at the museum is the simple fact that the museum exists at all.
“If it wasn’t for Nancy Penfold we wouldn’t have a museum,” Thompson said. “The city was given the arrowhead collection and certain items to start the museum, but without Nancy’s love of history and community and her and her family’s involvement, I don’t think we’d even have a museum.”
The city of Fort Lupton plans to proclaim March 5 as Nancy Penfold Day.
Contact Gene Sears at 303-659-2522, ext. 217 or gsears@metrowestnewspapers.com