NATIVITY OF OUR LORD (1958)

Although a post office and railroad stop since the 1880s, Broomfield consisted of little more than broom corn farms until its incorporation in 1961. Between 1950 and 1980, the Boulder County farm town grew from a hamlet of 176 people to a Denver suburb numbering 20,739 that sprawled into neighboring Adams and Jefferson counties.

A Broomfield Welcome Wagon hostess, whose business it was to visit and greet newcomers to the community, happened to be a Catholic. After she had counted almost 200 Catholic families in the area, she helped organize a new parish, which held organizational meetings at the Turnpike Lumber Company.

These Catholics met for the first parish Mass on September 7, 1958, in the basement of the Broomfield branch of Empire Savings Bank. On August 29, 1958, Archbishop Vehr established the Nativity of Our Lord Church and appointed George Weibel as the first pastor. Land for a parish had been acquired in 1955, and construction began in January, 1959.

A local architectural firm, Langhart and McGuire, designed a flexible modern red brick building. Its first stage was a gym, but the fast growing congregation soon tested the architects' idea of an expandable building. In 1979, the altar was moved from the south to the west side of the gym and additional pews were built in a fan shape around it, leaving no seat further than forty feet from the altar. Under the expanded wood-beam ceiling, the church contained a large mahogany crucifix with a corpus of hand-carved oak. This crucifix as well as the stations of the cross were carved in Italy.

Nativity of Our Lord has had three pastors and four rectories over the years. Father Weibel (1958-1969) was followed by Arthur Dresen (1969-1978) and William P. Murphy (1978-present). Originally, the pastor lived in a rented apartment at 357 Laurel, then at 580 West 3rd Avenue in a building that is now the parish center, next at 590 West 3rd Avenue in what is now the parish convent, and then at 105 Midway.

The Sisters of Mercy opened the parish school in 1963 for grades three through eight. A school gym was built in 1966, and first and second grades were added in 1973. In 1981, the Sisters of Mercy were replaced by Dominican and Franciscan sisters.

Thirty years after the Broomfield Welcome Wagon hostess helped organize local Catholics for a Mass in a bank basement, Nativity of Our Lord has become a congregation of about 1,300 families with an eight-grade school. Built and maintained with the help of over $200,000 raised by bingo games, this two-story, modern glass and brick school is the pride of the parish.