Travis Pinz was born in Longmont Colorado in the year 1973, and has grown up in the area for most of his life. He graduated from Longmont high school, along with his sister and most of his family members. Now, Pinz lives with his family in the town of Erie, planning to stay for the long run.
Pinz remembers always coming to Erie as a nearby getaway when he was a teen. He says, “growing up we used to come to Erie in my high school days because it was a smaller town.” However his true roots live within his grandmother, who grew up in the small town.
His great grandparents migrated to Erie from New York, and to New York from Germany in 1906, through this they became naturalized citizens and gathered land through the Homestead acts. They built a small farmhouse for them and their nine children to come near highway 52, just north of modern day Erie.
Unfortunately one of their children died at an early age, and another had left at an early age, leaving the still very full family with seven kids and their parents. Their last name was Ehlert. Pinz says, “and all the kids grew up on the farm. That was the thing back then- that’s really what they had to do.”
According to Pinz, life on the farm was very different from the life that many kids enjoy today. He shares, “no running water, no electricity… my grandmother often told stories about how that’s how they would get clean [the creek,] they would go to the creek and they longed for summertime because the creek was a lot warmer.”
Pinz’ grandmother, and her six other siblings along with their parents live in a small one bedroom home. His grandmother, Elizabeth, was one of the middle children. She graduated from Erie High School, which according to Pinz was all twelve grades, and consisted of around 36 other children. He says, “It was tough. These kids grew up on a farm that there wasn’t much so having children was a very big expense… my grandmother said, they saw the strain that they put on their mom and dad to feed seven kids.”
Through understanding his story, and his age-old roots in Colorado- as well as the hard work and determination it took to travel from Germany to the central United States in order to start a new life, Pinz is able to take life lessons from their story. He reflects, “[My family,] surrounded themselves with solid people, around which was good. And that didn’t matter what color or anything like that. How did you value their friendship…”
This idea flows back to his great grandparents and the example that they had on his grandmother. He says, “you had to have those friends and neighbors to help each other during certain times.”
He says that this sense of community is still here, “it still has that farming community. Whether you are farming or anything else you still have a sense of community.” He then goes even further to say, “that’s where I want to raise my kids.”
Through the generations the story of Travis Pinz and his family tree shows where Erie has been, and where the people, culture, and history has come from, however it also shows who Erie is now today.
