Lee Scamehorn is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A veteran of World War II and the Korean conflict, he earned an undergraduate degree at Western Michigan University, and graduate degrees at the University of Illinois, Urbana, after which he taught at Boulder for 39 years. He is the author of several books, including Pioneer Steelmaker in the West: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1872-1903 (1976), Mill & Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century (1992), Albert Eugene Reynolds: Colorado's Mining King (1995), and High Altitude Energy: The History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado (2002). Colorado's Small Town Industrial Revolution is a study in three parts. This, the first volume, examines the origin, evolution, and demise of commercial food canning and preserving industries in northeastern counties from 1871 to 1984. Nearly three dozen communities, in Arapahoe, Adams. Boulder, Larimer, Morgan and Weld Counties, acquired canning or preserving enterprises, and frequently both. These, together with a surge in flour milling, meat slaughtering and packing, creameries, cheesemaking, milk condensing, and sugar beet refining, comprised a burst of rural industrial development that can be called a small town industrial revolution. It began in the late nineteenth century, and was, for all practical purposes, over by about 1920. The few commercial enterprises that continued in operation after 1920, catered not to local and regional markets, but regional and national markets. Originally, it was the author's intent to end this study in 1960. It was a logical stopping place, for by that date most of the state's pioneer food enterprises has disappeared, and the few remaining -- Empson Packing Company and Kuner Pickle Company, consolidated as the Kuner-Empson Company, Fort Lupton Canning Company, and Loveland Canning Company -- differed dramatically from what they had been earlier in the twentieth-century. The decision to continue beyond 1960 grew out of a desire to follow the surviving pioneer firms to their close of operations. In addition, food processors who appeared after 1930 were interesting and worthy of recognition. Only one survived into the twenty-first century.