A few months later, the colony platted the town of Longmont around the confluence of St. In 1871 Seth Terry, a representative of the Chicago-Colorado Colony Company, came to the area looking for potential town sites.

He filed for a 160-acre homestead near the small community of Burlington, on the south side of St. William Dickens in Longmontīorn at sea in the early 1840s while his family was emigrating from England, William Henry Dickens came to Colorado in 1860, at age seventeen. Today, the locally owned and operated Dickens Tavern occupies the first floor, while the second-story auditorium continues to host live entertainment.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

It stood vacant until 1986, when it reopened with a restaurant on the first floor and a remodeled auditorium on the second. The two-story opera house, with Dickens’s Farmers National Bank on the first floor and an auditorium on the second, served as an important community hub in Longmont from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s.Īfter continued use throughout the twentieth century, the Dickens Opera House was abandoned in 1978. In 1881–82 rancher and businessman William Henry Dickensbuilt the Dickens Opera House at the corner of Third and Main Streets in downtown Longmont.

Dickens opera house hotel longmont