Chamber Celebrates Centennial

A playful interactive sculpture by local artists Susan Gill Jackson and Sandra Graves, given to the Steamboat Springs community by local businesses, celebrates the Chamber's one hundred year legacy and the history of Steamboat Springs through three children at play—a cowgirl, a skier, and a miner—representing the community's ranching, skiing, and mining heritage. The Steamboat Springs Commercial Club was founded in 1907 to attract tourists and settlers to Northwest Colorado, renamed itself the Chamber of Commerce of Steamboat Springs in 1941, expanded by 1959 to fifteen committees and one hundred sixty-seven members out of one hundred ninety-nine businesses, helped launch the 1984 'Steamboat in the Summertime' campaign, graduated the first Leadership Steamboat class in 1992, moved to the Visitor Center at Angler's Drive and U.S. 40 in 1993, and celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2007. Hidden icons within the sculpture point to the region's Ute heritage, the yampa or bear in Ute mythology, the railroad, Carl Howelsen's ski jumping, Olympic heritage, Ski Town U.S.A., Hahns Peak's gold-mining past, the confluence of the Elk and Yampa rivers, Routt County's hot and mineral springs, and Perry-Mansfield.

Steamboat Springs, Colorado · United States