Boulder began as a supply town for gold miners in the mountains, and Pearl Street is believed to have been named for the wife of one of the town’s 54 founders. When these men established the Boulder City Town Company on February 10, 1859, the land was part of the hunting grounds for roaming bands of Arapahos.

In a much paraphrased account twenty-two years later, Chief Niwot, also known as Chief Left Hand, supposedly proclaimed that the Boulder valley was so beautiful that people seeing it will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of its beauty. This became known as “Niwot’s curse” or, in modern terminology, an early attempt at growth control.

The gold-seekers stayed anyway, and they drove a stake into the middle of the present-day intersection of Broadway and Pearl. Surveyors sighted across the stake to Valmont Butte, to the east, to determine a straight line for Pearl Street.

In the early days, whenever it rained or snowed and horse-drawn freight wagons and carriages shuttled provisions and people around town, the street was thick with ruts. In the summertime, it billowed with dust and flies. To encourage shoppers to come into their stores, individual business owners built their own wooden sidewalks – but they didn’t always match the height or the width of those of their neighbors. In the 1880s, the boardwalks were removed and replaced with flagstones.

A horse-drawn streetcar seemed like a good idea when it was introduced in 1891. Laborers plowed and scraped Pearl Street and laid tracks. After a horse pulled the wooden streetcar in one direction, it was unhitched and moved to the other end for the return ride. When the novelty of the paying customers wore off, the streetcar went out of business. A decade later, and with a little more sophistication, Boulder residents welcomed the new electric streetcars that wound their way through town. At the time, crushed rock created a smoother and cleaner road surface.

Large streetcars of the Interurban Railroad transported passengers along Pearl Street from 12th Street (now Broadway) to 31st Street, beginning in 1908. Pedestrians could jump on and off while doing their business downtown, or ride all the way to Denver.