While other mountain towns have remained so in name only, Nederland has managed to hold on to its mountain flavor, its funky character, and its history. It’s as if someone guided our town, protected it, and moved it gently forward, while uncovering and then preserving its past. That’s because someone did. Glenna Carline is responsible for so much of what we now take for granted, yet many of us don’t even know her name.

Glenna died on July 17, 2022, at 89 years of age. This is to help you know her, to preserve our memory of her, and to thank her.

Glenna was born in 1933. In her teens she became a beauty queen, winning third runner-up for Miss White Pine, Nevada, where she grew up. After that she married her high school sweetheart, her soulmate, and her partner in so many endeavors, Tom.

They moved to Nederland with their two sons, Eric and Tom, in the late sixties - the peak of the hippy era. Glenna got her real estate license and did well. This was when music lived at Caribou Ranch, and she sold property to Stephen Stills and Dan Fogelberg. It seemed that pretty much everyone up here bought their house through Glenna.

Nederland realtor Liz Ford knew her well. “She and Tom embraced Nederland as an integral part of their family.They gave their heart and soul to this town and welcomed all people who crossed their path. She had a vision of a small, prosperous town with a big heart.”

Glenna and Tom bought several large with an eye toward protecting them from incompatible, cookie-cutter development. She wanted nature to remain an integral part of Ned. No fast foods or chain stores. No brick and stainless steel strip centers. A mountain town, with mountain aesthetics, that regular people could afford to call home.

Glenna created Nederland’s Chamber of Commerce in 1984, to organize Ned’s businesses and get them to work together for the good of the town. The Chamber gave money to nonprofits for festivals, like Miners Days. It provided seed money for small, local business start- ups. It beautified the town and sponsored special holiday sales. It also put on the original Old Timers Days, which first took place on July 27, 1985.

At the time, there was no place for people to dump their bigger items of trash, so those often got left on the side of the road, in the forest, and in or around old mineshafts. In its very first year, the Chamber organized a Town Clean-Up Day. You’ve probably participated; it is still going on as an annual event, the first Saturday of every June.

Back then, if you wanted to walk from one side of the town to the other, you had to take your chances on the highway. Glenna and Rob Schneider came up with the idea of a rustic covered bridge. Yes, the one between Crosscut Pizza and the Boulder Creek Lodge. It was not an easy project and there was some litigation involved, but Glenna and Rob got it done.

Glenna loved Ned history. She served as the head docent at the Gillaspie House Museum, and she was one of the original, founding members of the Nederland Area Historical Society. She and other members met with local pioneer families, preserved their family photos (25,000 of them), acquired heirlooms and mining equipment, and recorded their memories on oral history cassette tapes.

By 1995 the old Nederland Post Office (now the home of Nederland Feed, and before that the Business Connection) had maxed out. The Feds were looking for a bigger location. Glenna and Tom owned a wild-flower-rich meadow, Carline Meadow, just west of Barker Res. They sold a piece of it so our current Post Office could be built there.

You can’t do a story like this without writing about our 1923 Bucyrus 50-B steam shovel. Glenna, with the Nederland Area Historical Society, helped acquire it, rebuild it, and bring it to its current location. In 2015 she accompanied its bucket to Charlotte, North Carolina, to represent the town of Nederland at a 100 year celebration of the digging of the Panama Canal. The celebration was attended by heads of state and commerce from all of the countries who used the canal – as you can imagine, lots of them.

Glenna’s true passion was the Nederland Cemetery. It was a mess! Tombstones were fallen over, broken, and mixed up. Coffins had shifted four or five feet into the next plot, with no documentation as to where they were originally located. Local folklore says this is how Stinky Gulch got its name.

In the late 1990s she contacted CU, explained the situation, and talked them into sending up some students with the school’s ground-penetrating radar equipment. Once Glenna could see what was under the surface, she realized things were even worse than she thought – some graves that were marked by a headstone with a single name, contained two or three caskets, stacked one on top of another.

This is where Glenna’s relationships with the pioneer families came into play. She discovered that during the Spanish Flu epidemic, a person would die, be properly buried, and a few days later their spouse or kids would die. Caskets quickly stacked up in the same hole, with no time to add names to markers. Glenna’s oral histories provided those names.

It took some years, but with the help of the CU students and their ground- penetrating radar, Glenna cataloged all the gravesites and recorded the information in a book. One copy is kept at Nederland Town Hall, another with the Historical Society. Thanks to Glenna’s passion, if a family thinks they have a relative in the cemetery, they can look in the book and find the exact location.

Glenna was honored for her work. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Nederland Area Historical Society in 2015.

There will be a memorial service for Glenna at 1 p.m. on Saturday, August 27, 2022, at Arapahoe Ranch. If you knew Glenna, loved her, have a story about her, or just appreciate all her work, stop by and say thank you, Glenna, for one last time.