You are currently viewing Golden Rule Store with owner Silas K. Camenga, 4th Street, ca. 1920.
Golden Rule Store with owner Silas K. Camenga, 4th Street, Fort Lupton, CO, ca. 1920.
Silas Camenga in front of Golden Rule Store, Fort Lupton

This is a picture of my grandfather standing in front of the dry goods store he co-owned with his wife, my grandmother, Lillian (Berg) Camenga, on the north side of 4th Street. The woman pictured is probably an employee. The Golden Rule Store sat a couple or three doors east of the St. John Mercantile building, which sits on the northeast corner of 4th & Denver. The building which housed the Golden Rule Store is no longer standing.

Silas was born in Brookfield, New York, in 1881. Around 1909, he came west and worked for a period of time for John Cash Penney in Penney’s Golden Rule Store in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

[Penney was born in Missouri but relocated to Colorado to improve his health. His path to the Rock Springs’ store began in Longmont, where he showed promise as a clerk in the town’s Golden Rule Store. (This followed the failure of the butcher shop he had opened in Longmont in 1898.) At that time, the Golden Rule was a small dry goods chain offering work clothes, fabric, and sewing supplies. In 1899, the chain’s owners sent Penney to their Evanston, WY, store. In 1902 Penney bought a one-third partnership in their Kemmerer, WY, store. Penney went on to open stores in Rock Springs and Cumberland. After buying out his partners’ Wyoming holdings in 1907, he went on to open stores in Idaho, Utah and across the nation. In 1913, in partnership with William Henry McManus, he changed the name of his stores from the Golden Rule to the J.C. Penney Company.]

Silas moved on from Rock Springs and got a job working for his cousin, Sam Brand, in Park City, Utah, at a dry goods store that Sam owned there. While working there, Silas got to know co-worker Lillian Hilma Berg, and love blossomed. She would become my grandmother. By the time they were married in December of 1916, Silas and Lillian had established the Golden Rule Store in Lupton, an enterprise in which each held equal interests.  They bought the initial stock for the store from a gentleman in Longmont named E.L. Ogden.

Fort Lupton is where Lillian and Silas would live and raise a family. They lived above the store. Lillian gave birth to my Dad (John) in 1917, my Uncle Don in 1921 and my Aunt Lois in 1929.

Some of Dad’s childhood memories included: visiting blacksmith J. M. McKay and watching him chew and spit tobacco while shoeing horses; playing shinney, a form of dirt hockey utilizing a Colorado condensed milk can, smashed in the middle, as a puck and knocked back and forth with a stick (usually a broomstick); the miniature golf course that Silas built behind the store for the kids to use; chasing the ice truck along with other kids to grab a chip of ice to suck on; the firemen flooding three or four vacant lots in the winter for ice skating; buying an agate marble for 25 cents at a candy and novelty store run by an older couple on the corner of Third and Denver; and Silas taking Dad out in the country for driving lessons when Dad was about 9 years old.

Lillian died in 1933 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 39, and Silas died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of 57. They are buried at Fort Lupton’s Hillside Cemetery.

After Silas’ death, his business was purchased and moved over to Denver Avenue. As a kid, I remember our family going into that Golden Rule Store, and Art Lang, who managed and/or owned the store, was always there to greet us.

Dad and Uncle Don have passed on, which only increases my appreciation and love for Aunt Lois, who lives in Nebraska.

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