On an afternoon in mid-January, Barbara Fleming walked into the Fort Collins history archive with murder on her mind.

OK, that's not exactly fair. The 84-year-old Coloradoan columnist — sporting spectacles, a cozy sweatshirt and a head of silver curls — was researching a murder.

In just a few days, Fleming would be doing a radio interview on the 1907 cold case murder of Joseph Allen — a Fort Collins police officer who was beaten to death while on patrol — for Townsquare Media's public affairs show, "Tuned into NoCo."

This isn't out of the ordinary for Fleming. As an almost lifelong Fort Collins resident and Northern Colorado's unofficial historian, her days are often filled with history presentations, interviews, research trips and time spent writing her weekly column for the Coloradoan, "A Walk Through History."

Since 1982, Fleming has written or co-written 10 books and novels — most of which center on Northern Colorado history.

And since August 2012, she has dutifully penned a new installment of "A Walk Through History" every week, never — and I mean never — missing a column. She's up to at least 389 and counting.

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Fleming moved away from Fort Collins for almost 20 years, most of which she spent teaching in the Denver area. In 2000, she retired and moved home, where she started writing about local history again in earnest, with few expectations.

"I just wanted to write and hoped to have some success," Fleming said modestly.

Through her columns, books and presentations, she's earned that success, as well as something else: a local nickname.

She hears it occasionally when she's out and about in Fort Collins — when someone recognizes the photo of Fleming that runs alongside "A Walk Through History."

"Hey!" people excitedly say. "You're the history lady!"

An early start to a lifelong love for history

Fleming is in her element when she talks about Fort Collins.

A true native, she was born here — as Barbara Stimmel — in 1936.

Larimer County Hospital, where she came into the world, is no longer standing, Fleming noted. Nor are the city boundaries she grew up within.

"I live in what they call Old Town," Fleming said. "Well, when I lived here growing up, that was town. You could walk from one end to the other."

Fleming was one of three children born to Lester Stimmel and Margaret Perry Stimmel, who met as professors at Colorado State University, then Colorado Agricultural College, in the late 1920s.

Lester taught English there until his retirement in 1967. Margaret taught in the university's bacteriology department until her unexpected death in 1960.

"She was a brilliant woman," Fleming said of her mother, describing how Margaret was the only female professor in CSU's bacteriology department, which was led by a man who "believed women should be barefoot and pregnant," Fleming recalled.

"He never gave her a raise. He gave her the toughest classes and the latest labs," Fleming said. "But her students loved her."

Being raised by two working parents, Fleming said she, her younger brother and older sister were latchkey kids before the term was even invented.

As a girl, Fleming said she spent a lot of time wandering around the city's pioneer museum — a network of historic cabins and early Fort Collins structures that were displayed behind the Carnegie Library starting in 1941.

She mooned over stately movie theaters in Old Town that are long gone.

"They had balconies and big screens," Fleming remembered. "Nothing like theaters today."

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When the mood struck her, Fleming would run off to the CSU Oval, then wander over to Old Main, one of the university's original buildings where Fleming's father taught for nearly 40 years.

"I loved that old building," Fleming said. "The floors creaked. It was cold and drafty in the winter and hot in the summer. You could easily get lost going from one floor to the other."

Fleming said it was this early interest in old buildings that first stoked her love for Fort Collins history. Her road to writing about it, however, would include some twists and turns.

A career woman with a love of Fort Collins

"My parents always said, 'You're going to college and you're going to have a career,' " Fleming said of how she and her sister were raised. "In those days, women were supposed to get married, stay home and have children. They had no intention of having us do that."

Fleming worked through most of her time at Fort Collins High School clipping and cataloging newspaper articles for the Coloradoan. After graduating, she enrolled at CSU, then the Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.

Her dream was to teach history, but she was told over and over that she would never find a job, Fleming recalled. In those days, men taught history and sciences while women were generally limited to teaching languages or home economics.

With her sights still set on becoming a teacher, Fleming majored in English instead.

After two years at Colorado A&M, Fleming got married and left her studies to raise a family. Once her three children were in school, she returned to the university, where she finished her bachelor's degree in English in 1967 and earned a master's degree in rhetoric in 1970.

While still raising three children, Fleming also worked as a journalist — including a four-year stint covering social clubs and writing feature stories for the Coloradoan in the mid-1970s.

"This tells you the times," Fleming said. "I was called the women's editor."

After leaving the Coloradoan and divorcing her first husband, Fleming taught journalism at CSU as an adjunct professor. She remarried in 1981 and moved to Denver with her second husband, Tom Fleming.

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The couple lived away from Fort Collins for nearly 20 years. After teaching English in Denver area high schools and community colleges, Fleming retired and decided to come home for good.

"I told Tom, 'I'm going back to Fort Collins and you can come with me or not, so...'" she said matter-of-factly. "I just always wanted to be here."

The two moved back and Fleming launched herself into history writing. She started churning out books, from a rundown of Fort Collins' most legendary locals to a novel centered around a young woman's journey away from her small Colorado hometown.

Fleming wrote a history column for Fort Collins Now, a free weekly newspaper. When that closed down, she had another idea — to return to the very newspaper where she got her start.

The history of 'A Walk Through History'

When Barbara Fleming started writing "A Walk Through History" for the Coloradoan in 2012, hers was one of at least 30 columns that regularly ran in the newspaper, according to Coloradoan Executive Editor Eric Larsen.

Now Fleming is one of only two community columnists whose writing appears in the Coloradoan weekly.

"It's (a column) that (helps) you learn something about the place in which you live every time you read it," Larsen said. "(Barbara’s) done a good job of going across the canvas of history to tell you how this place formed not just in the settler days, but in more recent history."

Her first column was about Antoine Janis — a French-Canadian fur trapper and the first Anglo settler of the Poudre Valley. But after almost 400 columns, she's been able to write about anything and everything Fort Collins, from flashy Western rodeo stars to true hero Jack Kissock — the forward-thinking father of Fort Collins' sewer system.

When asked which columns stick out in her memory, Fleming mentions the often untold stories of Northern Colorado's women. One of her favorites — written a few years ago — centered on the adventures of Edith Boothroyd, a British woman who married an American rancher and moved to Northern Colorado in the 1870s.

"The sun was so intense here that she carried a parasol all the time," Fleming said. "But by golly, that woman learned to ride a horse, to herd cattle, to live as a ranch wife. Stories like that catch my attention."

Bringing historical women 'back to life'

In Fleming's tidy east Old Town home, tall bookcases tower over her petite 4-foot-11-inch frame. Each one is lined with dozens, if not hundreds of books — ranging from skinny novels to history books as thick as a brick.

A true bookworm, Fleming is currently reading three books, which were pulled out and resting on a couch-side table during a visit to her home late last month.

Unsurprisingly, two of the books were centered around strong women — one was a novel about a pioneering suffragette in post-World War I era London and the other was Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's "The Book of Gutsy Women."

"Women have been largely ignored by history," Fleming said. "So one of my goals in writing is to bring them back to life."

Framed family photos also pepper Fleming's bookcases. One, prominently displayed in her office, shows Fleming's two granddaughters, Sarah and Melissa, when they were toddlers. Now they're fully grown and in college in Virginia — Melissa, the older sister, is working on a master's degree in English.

"And she tutors in calculus!" Fleming brags.

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Back at the history archive on Fleming's mid-January research trip, Fleming took a quick break from her research to learn about another girl's recent accomplishments.

The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery's history archive curator, Lesley Struc — at Fleming's behest — had pulled up some recent photos of her 4-year-old daughter, Juliet. Sliding her finger across her phone screen, Struc swiped through pictures from Juliet's visit with Santa this Christmas and videos of her first figure skating lesson.

“Hold on, let me find a good one," Struc said.

“Oh, Lesley, they’re all good," Fleming quipped.

'She's really a champion of local history'

Given her weekly columns and book research, Fleming is a regular at the archive and Struc said she's known her for years.

When Fleming walked in to finish research on the Allen murder, another archive guest stopped in her tracks when she realized the woman standing next to her was the Barbara Fleming.

"People come in and they always say, you know, 'I read that article from Barbara Fleming,' " Struc said.

"She's really a champion of local history," Struc added. "... I think she's just become this storyteller for our community, and she's great at it."

I asked Fleming if, after writing hundreds of columns and 10 books, she's ever afraid of running out of story ideas. I think it's a reasonable question, but Fleming nearly gasps.

The answer? A firm "no."

To her, a new column idea is always around the corner, whether it's in the form of a tip from a reader, something she notices around town or a tidbit hidden within the history archive's walls.

The story continues below.

Finding the next story

During our archive visit, Fleming settled into a chair as part of her latest fact-finding mission.

After a few minutes, an archivist emerged from the front desk area with bad news. There isn't much information on Joseph Allen — the police officer who was murdered in 1907.

It was no matter, though. Fleming had other avenues to go down as well as other columns to research.

As she peeked through information on Graves Dairy instead — the subject of one of her next installments of "A Walk Through History" — the pencil in her hand flitted to life as she jotted down key dates or interesting facts.

Soon, those notes will turn into words on a page, sentences of a story and a column in the newspaper. Before long, the people of Northern Colorado would get to know much more about Graves Dairy.

"People think history is boring, but it doesn't have to be," Fleming said, looking up from her notes. "History is people and history is their stories. That's what I do. I like to tell stories."