By Justin George
Camera Staff Writer

LONGMONT — The Dougherty Museum is an old warehouse with a cement floor, rows of round lights that dangle from the rafters and sunlights, shielded by paper, tingeing the musty space with a fond sepia haze that often shades black-and-white films.

In the ghostly warehouse a mile south of Longmont, old cars, horse-drawn buggies and phonographs urge visitors to unearth the past that has been flimsily documented in history books or trapped in old timers' memories, such as 78-year-old Dan Blake's.

"When it first opened, my wife and I cased the joint," the overall-wearing Longmont man says, looking over old Studebakers and farm thrashers.

She died last month, Blake says, and he needed another trip to the museum to divert his attention or just to focus it.

"This is a good way," he says, before jumping into a story about leaving a broken-down tractor in a field and running to Fort Morgan for new rubber wheels, which made the tractor run "as smooth as silk."

The museum, considered Boulder County's greatest collection of early 1900s automobiles, farm tractors and musical machines, opened again Friday as it has every summer for 25 years.

Model Ts, with round bulb lights and grinning grills, Boulder magnate Andrew J. Macky's green 1902 Mobile Steamer and scores of other machines within the warehouse still come alive, their gritty oil dripping onto plastic sheets under carriages like drops of blood.

"It hand-choked twice, but it was rolling," Mike Dougherty says about the 1929 Model T he drove when he went to high school in the 1960s that is now parked in the museum. While other kids his age drove big eight-cylinder muscle cars that froze up in the winter, he says, his Model T never failed him.

The Dougherty family's love of technology and machinery can be traced back to Mike's grandfather, Henry Dougherty, his grandsons say.

Henry Dougherty moved his family to Longmont from drought-plagued Oklahoma in 1918. He had heard that Longmont and California were the only two regions that had the infrastructure to irrigate crops with "free running water" and not wells, Mike says.

During the Depression, Henry Dougherty and his sons took a risky gamble by growing a business out of the family's flock of bronze turkeys, using science and never-heard-of techniques to hurdle the obstacles of the time.

"Of course if you got a bunch of turkeys together back then and disease hit, they would die," Mike says. But Henry used incubators and chicken-wire screens to raise turkeys, allowing the birds' droppings to fall into sand below.

The business boomed, and in 1938, Henry was invited to the famed Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York for the Merchants Ball. It was "a big deal back then," Mike says.

Henry's son Ray Dougherty also became fascinated with machinery and inventions tinkering on the farm. He started the Dougherty Museum in 1977, and, his sons say, he used to play the museum's pipe organs or pianos until someone visited. He loved to escort people on tours, telling them about cranks and gears, steam and friction power.

Each year, his sons say, he scoured old barns and businesses, looking for new artifacts.

"When he got something new, he worked on it to make it run, just to make it run," his son Doug Dougherty says.

The museum, located one mile south of Longmont on the east side of U.S. 287, is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through Sept. 1. Admission is $5 for adults and $3 for children ages 6-12. Children under 6 years of age are free. Contact Justin George at (303) 473-1359 or georgej@thedailycamera.com.

June 2, 2002

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