Wally

1230 S Boise Ave, Loveland, CO 80537

W.B. Osborn arrived in Colorado more than 160 years ago. Like so many others, he was looking for gold, but his education lifted him to prominence as a “judge”, the “clerk of the miner’s court,” Wally says.

Wally, whose initials are W.B., jokes that he was named after his legendary ancestor—not only a justice but also the first man in Larimer County to build a home with a shingled roof and wooden floor. In truth, Wally’s parents named him after his maternal grandfather, who grew up in Chicago.

Wally returned to his namesake’s roots for a time. After college, he got a job at Leo Burnett, a top advertising agency based in the Windy City. He worked on the Marlboro Man campaign. He met his wife. But after seven years, he moved back to his family’s farm.

“W.B. Osborn bought this piece of property in, like, 1859,” Wally recounts. “All the paperwork back then was sort of . . . it took a while. The Civil War was about to start. So I think the actual date for our farm here was 1861. Which makes us a centennial farm, [meaning] it’d have to be continually owned by the same family, and they’re living on it and operating it the whole time. So we’re one of the older—if not the oldest—farms in the state, even before it was a state.”

(That’s true. Colorado became a state in 1876.)

In the fall, the enduring Osborn Farm, located along South Boise Avenue in Loveland, welcomes the harvest with their community. They sell pumpkins by the pound, hayrides by the butt, gourds, corn stalks, honey, and more.

“My mom and dad started the pumpkin thing here when I was maybe three or two, four or five . . . in there somewhere. It started pretty slow. It wasn’t anything like this in the beginning.” Wally’s sitting across from the families wandering the farm.

“The legend there is that my mom just kind of threw some pumpkin seeds out in the field. She thought it would be fun to have some pumpkins for me and my younger brother . . . and she just stuck all the extra pumpkins that showed up around that scarecrow out there with some overalls on—to just get rid of the pumpkins. People started stuffing money in his overalls, and it grew into this.”

Wally’s favorite part of the job? The families—the tradition.

“We hear it all the time. When people come up to the scales, they say, ‘When we first moved to Loveland, this was one of the first things that we found. And I brought my little kids here. And now they have grown up and gotten married, and they’re bringing their kids here.’ And I just get a kick out of that.”

Growing up, Wally learned all sorts of lessons from his chores, his family, and their stories. He often heard about W.B. Osborn trekking into the mountains to get wood. There were no trees dotting the plains back then.

“Now there are all these trees here. And we built each of these things,” Wally says, gesturing to the farm around him. “ . . . I was a kid when we built that barn. I was a kid when we built that house.”

Generations after “Judge” Osborn first broke ground here, his descendant offers this advice: “Find something that is yours and unique, and just keep pushing that thing forward a little bit at a time. Keep working, and keep that resilience.”