Boulder: unlikely site of Colorado's first gusher.

• Author: Lewis, David

A little more than a century ago, the People's Republic of Boulder hosted what was then Colorado's biggest oilfield. Today the oilfield looks like nothing so much as a gently rolling field bounded on one end by where the University of Colorado's East & Research Park, and the other by Niwot. However, when it was producing, Boulder Field looked like most oilfields of the day: smoky, smelly, dirty and chaotic.

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"Part of the beauty of this story is that, even in Boulder, you have a historic oilfield that provides lessons for the public that oil and gas has always been part of our history," says petroleum geologist Matt Silverman. "And oil development is compatible with the Western vistas that we really love, and with the development of the golf courses, recreation areas, beautiful homes and green spaces that now cover the area that was once the scene of a drilling frenzy."

Boulder Field also provided Colorado history's first gusher, at a site near what is today Boulder's 51st Street near Boulder Reservoir, an event unlikely to be duplicated nowadays.

"One of the ultimate ironies is that, of all the places in Colorado for the first gusher to have been drilled, it was drilled in green, politically correct Boulder," Silverman says. "In the old days they did not know how to control subsurface pressures, so that almost never happens anymore." It would take a detective to find the field today were it not for the efforts of Boulder-based attorney Karl F. Anuta and Silverman, exploration manager at Denver-based Robert L. Bayless, Producer LLC.

That's because Anuta and Silverman teamed to place the field's last producer, the McKenzie Well, on the National Register of Historic Places...