This company sat on the north side of Ninth Street between Denver Avenue and the railroad tracks, specifically at the northwest corner of the Union Pacific right-of-way and Ninth Street.   Its origins lay in a community effort by Fort Lupton area merchants and farmers to establish a cannery financed through popular subscriptions.  It opened in 1893.  However, profits proved elusive, so in 1898 the cooperative leased its facility to John H. Empson of Longmont, who utilized it for the processing of tomatoes and corn.  (Contracts for peas were processed at Empson’s main factory in Longmont, which, in 1905, was reportedly the largest pea cannery in the world.) 

In 1907, Empson bought the Fort Lupton cannery and sold it the next year to N. C. Barwise, a broker in Denver, who named it the N. C. Barwise Packing Company.  (Empson sold controlling interest in his canneries in 1920 and retired.   In 1927, a year after Empson’s death, the Kuner Pickle Company in Brighton purchased what remained of the Empson holdings and renamed itself the Kuner-Empson Company.)

In 1923, the Kuner Pickle Company leased the N. C. Barwise Packing Company and bought it outright the next year.   Following Kuner’s purchase of Empson’s holdings in 1927, the Barwise name was replaced by the Kuner-Empson name.  

The operations of the Kuner-Empson factory were brought to an abrupt end on Sunday, August 26, 1956, when the factory burned to the ground.  Fortunately, no one was in the place at the time.   Tomato processing had begun just the previous week with the canning of tomato juice, and the factory was to begin canning tomatoes the following Tuesday. 

Gary Bowles, then 8 years old, the son of Auzy Bowles, factory manager, spotted the fire at about 1:00 or 1:30 p.m. while playing in the yard of the Bowles’ home, which was located nearby at the southeast corner of Ninth Street and Denver Avenue.   The fire grew quickly, with flames reaching as high as 75 feet.  It was fought for about 4 hours by approximately 50 firefighters from Lupton and Brighton.  The factory was destroyed, and, as a result, approximately 300 employees would lose their jobs.  Fort Lupton fire chief Don McPherson said the cause of the fire was undetermined, but thought it may have been started by someone flipping a lit cigarette through an open window.

Rosie Bowles, Auzy’s daughter and older sister to Gary, responded to my Facebook posting of this photo.  She wrote, “I remember that day of the fire very well. Dad and I ran into the office. We each carried out what we could, and then we couldn’t go back in. It was a very sad day for many people.”

I remember that fire well.  I was nine years old, and our family was attending the St. William’s Catholic Church bazaar being held in the beautiful yard of Joe and Clara Witherow’s home on Ninth Street, west of Fulton Avenue.  When word came that the Kuner-Empson factory was on fire, I remember looking straight east down Ninth Street and seeing the flames, which looked massive to me even from six blocks away.

REFERENCES:

• Colorado’s Small Town Industrial Revolution – Commercial Canning and Preserving in
  Northeastern Colorado, by Lee Scamehorn, 2011, pp. 33, 100.
• Crossroads in Eden: The Development of Fort Lupton, 1835 – 2000, by Adam Thomas,
  October 2003, pp. 43 – 44.
• Denver Post clipping dated August 27, 1956.
• Greeley Tribune dated August 27, 1956 (at www.newspapers.com)
• Newspaper clipping dated August 27, 1956. Publisher unknown, but most likely the Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News.
• Rosie Bowles Facebook posting.