Barbara Lawlor, Nederland. Sold out.

By 8:30 p.m. Wednesday October 21,  Dawn Dennison rolled out the last dough ball, apologizing to the family with a couple of kids who came in for dinner.

No more pizza. The customers looked longingly at the people chewing, relishing the fresh flavors, the texture of the crust.

The new Crosscut Pizzeria and Taphouse was supposed to have been a soft opening, not much publicity, a try-out night to see what works and what needs work. A bunch of friends and neighbors, nothing big. It didn’t work out that way.

For the past six months, Nederland residents have been watching the progress of the old Off Her Rocker, Dog House Video shop at the intersection of First Street and Hwy. 119. They watched the process of gutting the historic building, digging up decades of treasures; they watched the new paint, the landscaping next to the pedestrian bridge; the new floor, the tables carried in, and the bright, shiny brand new oven, the heart of pizza business.

Many of them have known Dawn Dennison and Tom Plant since they opened the Acoustic Coffeehouse where well-known local musicians enjoyed playing in an intimate setting. From 1994-2011, the couple’s brick house venue became a destination for music lovers and coffee connoisseurs.

While Dawn kept the home fires brewing and the oven baking, Tom entered into his political career. From 1999 to 2007, Tom was our State Representative, Representing Western Boulder County, Gilpin County and Clear Creek County. He was Chairman of the Appropriations Committee 2006-2007 and Chairman of the Joint Budget Committee 2007. He was the Energy Secretary under Gov. Bill Ritter from 2007 to 2011.

But this is a couple who doesn’t like to sit still for long. Dawn and Rollinsville resident Geoff Hoyl had talked about building a community wood oven so anyone could bring a bowl of dough and bake their own bread.

“But Health Departments don’t like that kind of thing,” says Dawn, “and the town government didn’t know what to do with that sort of proposition. It’s very unusual. In all the googling around, we found a company in Maine that built really good mobile wood ovens,” and Crust was born. Dawn and Tom and their oven became well known, not just in the mountains, but in places in the flatlands, where word spread about the high quality of their product.

Dawn says she loved working outside. She loved traveling to different places where she always had great views as she made the pizzas, and the kitchen set up felt like a kitchen on a river trip. “On the other hand, working outside really limited the amount of days I could work. Dough doesn’t like to stretch in temperatures lower than about 60 degrees. I catered a lot of weddings, cooked for many farm dinners in the middle of fields, and had an amazing summer Tuesday night gig at Salto for three years. The Salto Tuesdays are what gave us the confidence that we might be able to open a little pizza place up here. We will be forever grateful for that launching pad. We named a pizza after them.”

A secret shared by Dawn: “Before I got the mobile oven, I had never made a pizza from scratch in my life. Thank god for u-tube and good bread books.”

Dawn spent a winter trying out different flours and experimenting with ratios of flour to water and figuring out fermentation times. But it’s really just four ingredients, she says. Dough is very forgiving, kind of hard to mess it up. She uses organic, Colorado-milled flour, and thinks that the town’s good-tasting water might have a lot to do with it.

But even as Crust flourished, Dawn and Tom missed the Acoustic Coffeehouse and the sense of community it had. They wanted to make pizza year round. They love their town and want to be here and work here.

Tom and Dawn partnered with friends Peter Marshall and Sharon Tupa, and began looking for the perfect location in downtown Nederland. You can’t beat their corner.

After closing the property deal, it took about six months to remodel and turn the building into what they had envisioned. They hired contractor, Pete Schmidtmann of Vertical Construction who shares the same love of history, old stuff and re-purposing what the building had into what they needed and wanted. “We reused some of everything we took out of the building into another use within it. We absolutely preserved the integrity and character of it. It came out better than our wildest dreams,” says Dawn.

Tom was fascinated with the pieces of history that were discovered as the walls and floors were peeled away, revealing pieces of the past. The south end of the building is the original building from early in the last century. Under the carpet there was linoleum, under the linoleum there was tar paper, and under the tar paper there were complete newspapers that were folded out flat. The newspapers were from between 1943 and 1946 – Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Boulder Daily Camera and the Indianapolis Star.

“One of the first full pages we pulled up from the floor was the front of the Denver Post from March of 1946 – it was a full page, color painting of a man in the woods with a crosscut saw over his shoulder, with a poem called ‘The Pioneer’.  A friend framed it for us using pieces of the original floor that we had to take out for the kitchen,” says Tom.

Under the newspapers, there were some old signs that were nailed down to cover some of the worn away parts of the floor. Tom says they left the worn away parts, but put the signs up on the walls – there’s one for Beechnut, Dr. Pepper and Orange Crush. Around the bar, and around the base of the outside of the building, they re-used the tin from the roof that we replaced last winter. Old exterior doors are being re-used on the bathrooms, and the copper vent pipe that was inside the building is going to become the foot rail for the bar.

Original taps from the Wyncoop Brewery will be used for the beer taps. In the west dining room, they marked the original entrance to the building with metal on the floor which you can see in the old trading post photos.

Contractor Pete Schmidtmann, was everything that Tom had hoped for: a true master at creative use of used materials. He’s also a welder, and welded the decorative shelf supports  at the stand up bar and the pizza cutting station.

Tom says his parents’ old crosscut saw is up on the wall along with Dawn’s great grandfather’s old crosscut saw. There’s a picture of his parents in 1959 cutting a tree with their saw. “My mom came for lunch the first Saturday we were open. She’s 91,” says Tom.

Last Wednesday, when the first pizza came out of the oven, there was a line of eager customers. Tom and Dawn say they had not expected a sell-out crowd and were amazed at the support and interest. It was a good test to get thrown into the fray right off the bat.

They also sold out on Thursday, so began making “tons of extra dough” for the weekend, and from now on will be prepared. Crosscut has been averaging about 120 pizzas a night since they opened. Although there were the usual mixups that occur on an opening night, all went well. Tom and Dawn say they have 10 employees but will need to hire more staff.

“The staff we have now were amazing. We can’t get over how lucky we are to have ended up with such a hard-working, smart and talented crew. They absolutely  save us and they are the only reason we made it through these first few days.”

The name Crosscut is a reminder of Nederland’s pioneering past, and also, a crosscut saw looks a lot like a pizza cutter, so they had fun with the logo design.

Now that the restaurant is up and running, the owners have realized that the acoustics need some adjusting and they are looking forward to extending the deck on the south side of the building to offer creek side dining. They plan to change the menu often and stick with seasonal ingredients.

Is this their dream come true?

Tom says, “So far, it’s made us pretty happy. We hope we still have a few dreams left in us, though.”