Meeting will please come to order. My name is Craig Langel. I'm Chairman of Glacier Bancorp, Inc. Welcome to the 2021 Glacier Bancorp annual meeting, our 36th annual meeting and our second virtual meeting. For those shareholders listening in, you can vote and ask questions at this meeting if you have logged in with the control number on your proxy card and by following the instructions on the website. I would like to welcome my fellow Glacier Bancorp board members who have dialed into this call and are joining us today. Also in attendance are our 16 Glacier Bank division presidents, senior staff, BKD auditors, and our attorneys from Miller Nash Graham & Dunn. Before we go further, I would like to take a moment to recognize John Murdoch, who decided to retire this year and not stand for re-election. John served on the Glacier board for 16 years.
He also served on the board of our bank in Bozeman, Montana. John always helps us look at things from the business owner as well as the employee point of view, a skill he no doubt honed building Murdoch's Ranch & Home Supply into a Western U.S. leading retailer. We will miss John's consistent good nature and spot-on insights and observations. We all wish John the best in his retirement. Our company has been very fortunate to have been led by exceptional board members who all have left their mark on our company. I would like to introduce the current GBCI directors, David Boyles, Robert Cashell, Randy Chesler, Sherry Cladouhos, Jim English, Annie Goodwin, Kristen Heck, Doug McBride, and George Sutton. The records of Glacier Bancorp, Inc. show that 95,501,194 votes were entitled to be cast at this meeting, of which 47,750,598 represent a majority.
The secretary reported there were at least 82,439,117 shares of common stock presented in person or by proxy. This number represents 86.32% of the shares held by shareholders entitled to vote. Therefore, a quorum is present for the transaction of business. We will take a vote on the matters to be considered in a few moments. Questions can be submitted via the Ask a Question text box on the meeting portal. At the end of the meeting, questions will be answered as time allows. We previously received confirmation that a notice of meeting, proxy statement, and proxy card were mailed on or about March 16th, 2021 to each stockholder entitled to vote at this meeting at the close of business on their record date of February 25th, 2021. Copies of an affidavit to this effect will be attached to the minutes for this meeting.
There are four items on our agenda to be acted upon as stated in the notice of meeting. The first one is the election of all directors to serve one-year terms to expire. The nominees are David C. Boyles, excuse me, Robert A. Cashell, Jr., Randall M. Chesler, Sherry L. Cladouhos, James M. English, Annie M. Goodwin, Kristen L. Heck, Craig A. Langel, Douglas J. McBride, and George R. Sutton. The second item is to approve an amendment to the company's amended and restated articles of incorporation to provide for indemnification of directors and officers of the company. Item three is to vote on an advisory non-binding resolution to approve the company's compensation of executive officers. The advisory resolution will approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in the proxy statement.
This vote, often called a say on pay vote, is now required as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act. Previously, stockholders voted that their preference was to hold such a vote on an annual basis, and the board elected to do so. It is a non-binding vote, although the compensation committee and the board will certainly take the results of the vote into account when making future compensation decisions. The fourth item is to ratify appointment of accounting firm and is to ratify the appointment of BKD, LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. If any shareholder would like to make a comment regarding any of the agenda items, please submit your comment through the web portal. Ron, are there any questions?
Craig, there are no comments, no questions at this time.
Thank you. The polls are now open. Any shareholder who hasn't yet voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking on the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions there. Shareholders who have sent in proxies or voted via telephone or internet and do not wish to change their vote do not need to take any further action at this time. Now that everyone has had the opportunity to vote, I declare the polls closed. At this time, I would like to have our President and CEO, Randy Chesler, report to you about the business of Glacier Bancorp.
All right. Thank you, Craig, and I'd like to thank all of you here for taking time to attend our annual meeting. We really appreciate our stockholders' interest in and support of Glacier Bancorp. Talented people are the key to our business. Before I get started with the company performance report today, I would like to announce the following promotions to officer level that our board just approved this morning. Joe Stanislao to Assistant Vice President, IT Auditor. Nate Stevenson to Assistant Vice President, Compliance Officer. Erin Fout to Assistant Vice President, Internal Auditor. Camille Hutchinson to Assistant Vice President, Internal Auditor. Vance Kell to Assistant Vice President, Compliance Officer. Stephanie Lanigan to Assistant Vice President, Bank Accounting Supervisor. Johnny Burke to Assistant Vice President, ERCM Program Administrator. Brian Lombardi to Assistant Vice President, IT Manager, Infrastructure Software.
Stephen Van Rinzen to Assistant Vice President, Business Application Manager, and Bruce Wolford to Assistant Vice President, Information Security Manager. Congratulations to all of you on your promotions, and thank you. We are very excited to have you on our team, and we look forward to your continued contributions to our company. Our company is a collection of community banks, and the bank presidents from each of our 16 banks are very important to us. These executives are the glue that holds our organization together, and each of them is a leader in our company, as well as in the communities they serve. I would like to virtually introduce them to you. Scott Anderson of Mountain West Bank in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Scott Burke of First Security Bank of Missoula. Art Chase of Bank of the San Juans in Durango, Colorado.
Dean Comes of First Bank of Montana in Lewistown, Montana. Ross Duncan of Valley Bank of Helena. Liam Girard of Collegiate Peaks Bank in Denver, Colorado. Charlie Guildner of North Cascades Bank in Chelan, Washington. Shelley Holt of First Community Bank of Utah in Layton, Utah. Ty Nelson of First Bank of Wyoming in Cody, Wyoming. Jim Ness of First Security Bank in Bozeman, Montana. Amy Rose of Citizens Community Bank in Pocatello, Idaho. Brian Reilly of Foothills Bank in Prescott, Arizona. Mike Seppala of Western Security Bank in Billings. Derrick Sisson of First State Bank of Wyoming in Wheatland, Wyoming. Mike Smith of Glacier Bank right here in Kalispell, Montana, and Stan Wilmoth of Heritage Bank of Nevada in Reno, Nevada. The company thanks you all for your strong leadership.
Before I move on, I want to thank the past president of Glacier Bank, Bob Nystuen, for his leadership, commitment, and drive to be the best. Bob and his team worked tirelessly to build Glacier Bank into the dominant community bank in Northwest Montana. I'd also like to thank the past president of First Community Bank of Utah, John Jones, for his help during our purchase and integration of the bank. We wish Bob and John the best in their retirements. Next, I'd like to virtually introduce Ron Copher, our Chief Financial Officer, and Don Chery, our Chief Administrative Officer. Don Chery and Ron Copher are very important to our organization and to the divisions as well, and they, along with me, represent the company's executive management team. Now on to our senior staff.
These 12 executives are absolutely critical to helping each of our 16 bank presidents and their teams deliver exceptional service to our customers while maintaining a safe and sound bank. Tom Dolan, our Chief Credit Officer. Angela Dossey, our Chief Accounting Officer. T.J. Frickel, our Enterprise Risk Manager. Lee Groom, our Chief Experience Officer. Marcia Johnson, our Chief Operations Officer. David Langston, Director of Human Resources. Mark MacMillan, our Chief Information Officer. Paul Peterson, our Corporate Real Estate Manager. Byron Pollan, our Treasurer. Kasey Reese, our Internal Auditor Director, and Ryan Screnar, our Compliance Director. Thank you to all of you for your commitment to the company and the top-notch results for which you are responsible. I believe our company navigated through the pandemic extremely well, and I'm exceptionally proud of the Glacier team, their commitment and leadership, and their service to their communities during this time.
Management took many actions to help our employees and most importantly, ensure their safety. We removed the caps on benefit time so our people could take care of themselves or family members without having to worry about using up benefit time. We also paid time for any employee who chose to get vaccinated and covered any time needed to recover. I'm also proud to say we didn't lay off any employees during this pandemic. We also provided a number of tools to our commercial lenders to deploy if needed to help customers. Forbearance, modifications, and later on, SBA Paycheck Protection or PPP loans, I'll talk about these in a few moments. Today, almost all of our 193 locations are fully open for business. We expect all of them to be open soon across our eight-state footprint as COVID cases decline and vaccination rates increase.
Now let's take a look at 2020 and take an early look at 2021 quarterly results. I'm extremely pleased to report that 2020 was another record year for the company. At the end of 2020, we had over 3,000 talented employees who delivered exceptional results serving customers in eight western states from our 193 banking offices spanning almost 1,500 mi from the border of Canada all the way down to Mexico. We ended 2020 with record level of assets, gross loans, and deposits. 2020 was one of our biggest growth years in our history. In addition to strong financial performance, giving back to communities in which we operate remains a key priority for the company, and once again, the team did an outstanding job for the year by contributing over 18,000 volunteer hours and making close to $440 million in community development loans.
We remain committed to making the communities we serve a better place. It was a slow year for acquisitions due to COVID, but we did close State Bank of Arizona in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and integrated that bank into our Foothills Bank to create one of the largest community banks in Arizona, totaling over $1 billion in assets. Once again, we are recognized by Forbes as one of the top 20 performing banks out of the 100 largest banks in the country. Bank Director, a respected financial industry publication, rated us a top 20 performing bank in the U.S. for banks between five and 50 billion based on similar factors used by Forbes. As you can see from both Forbes and Bank Director, we have been in the top 20 for a number of years.
We ended 2020 with over $18 billion in assets, reflecting the growth of $4.8 billion or 35%, with much of this growth coming from our massive increase in deposits driven by the unprecedented government stimulus and our PPP lending and lack of spending by our customers. Loans grew 17% in 2020. This was primarily driven by our acquisitions, PPP lending, and good organic growth. Capital remains very important in our industry, and a conservative approach is almost always rewarded over time. We continue to look to maintain these strong levels of capital. Deposits were up 37% or $4 billion due to our acquisitions, PPP lending, government stimulus, and lack of opportunity for business and consumers to spend money due to COVID. We have one of the premier low-cost and stable deposit franchises in the industry.
The pie chart shows how our non-interest-bearing accounts grew again in 2020 to more than 37% of our deposit base. Credit quality continued the very positive improving trend we have seen over the last few years. The team has worked very hard to consistently reduce the level of non-performing assets. Glacier's dividend yield was 2.56% in 2020, and the company increased its quarterly dividend by over 6% compared to 2019. Dividends are our preferred method of capital distribution and will continue to be as we move forward. Stock performance over the last five years was good. Total return for this period was 107%.
This measure shows the return a stockholder would have received on our stock for the years if the stock price appreciation and dividends paid to a shareholder are calculated as a total return. You can see on the chart that we outperformed the S&P 500 commercial banks, which was 54% for the same period, compared to our 107%. We like to include this slide and update it every year just to show you that an investment of $8,000 when we went public in 1984 would be worth over $1.7 million today. While we're here to talk about 2020, since we just reported our first quarter 2021 earnings, let's take an early look at how we're doing. Strong growth pushed our assets close to $20 billion in the first quarter of 2021. That's up $1.3 billion, or 7%, from the end of 2020.
Loan growth for the first quarter was 5% annualized, and we're off to a good start to what we hope is a strong year of recovery. First quarter organic deposit growth was 35% annualized. Now, we expect this growth rate to subside as more customers begin to spend the savings that accumulated in 2020. As you can see, we had a very busy first quarter. We declared a dividend of $0.31 per share, funded over 6,500 in SBA payroll protection loans totaling $487 million, while also receiving $426 million in PPP loan forgiveness for our customers. We also achieved earnings per share of 85 cents. I'm going to end the presentation and just note that our success continues to be driven by our exceptional team, as we could not have delivered the results covered here without their unwavering dedication to serving our customers.
I'm very confident, under the guidance of our terrific board of directors, senior staff, and our employees, we'll make 2021 another record year for Glacier Bancorp. Thank you all, and I will now hand the meeting back to our Chairman, Craig Langel.
Thank you, Randy. If you have any questions, please enter them in the comment box now. Please note that we will attempt to answer as many questions as time allows, but only questions that are germane to this meeting. The final results of votes on the proposals are as follows. Directors final count. David C. Boyles, Robert Cashell Jr., Randall M. Chesler, Sherry L. Cladouhos, James M. English, Annie M. Goodwin, Kristen L. Heck, Craig A. Langel, Douglas J. McBride, and George R. Sutton, each receiving a plurality of the votes cast, are the newly elected directors of the company. They will hold office until their successors are elected and qualified. The indemnification final count. The amendment to the company's amended and restated articles of incorporation to provide for indemnification of directors and officers of the company has been approved. Final count on compensation.
The consideration of an advisory non-binding resolution on the company's executive compensation has been approved. BKD final count. BKD LLP has been ratified as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. We will now answer any questions submitted by shareholders to our web portal. Ron?
Craig, at this time, there are no questions submitted.
Thank you, Ron. If there is no further business to come before the meeting, this meeting is adjourned. Thank you, everyone.