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Agate Bluff Archaeological Site

The Agate Bluff Archaeological Site is a collection of four Late Prehistoric rockshelters located in a large bluff in northwest Weld County near the Wyoming border. In 1951–52 siblings Cynthia and Henry Irwin excavated the rockshelters and determined…

Akron Gymnasium

The Akron Gymnasium was a New Deal project built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938–40. Designed by the prominent Denver architect Eugene Groves, with a distinctive domed roof and skylights, it served as Akron’s main gymnasium and…

Akron Public Library

Located in the county seat of Washington County, the Akron Public Library occupies a one-story brick building constructed in 1931 at the corner of Main Avenue and East Third Street (302 Main Ave, Arkon, CO 80720). The building grew out of more than…

Alamosa County Courthouse

The Alamosa County Courthouse, located at 702 Fourth Street in Alamosa, was built by Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers between 1936 and 1938 to serve as an administrative and judicial headquarters for Alamosa County. The original structure…

All Souls Unitarian Church

Completed in 1893, All Souls Unitarian Church—now known as All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church—stands at 730 North Tejon Street in Colorado Springs. Located close to the Colorado College campus, the church is notable for its distinctive Shingle…

Alpine Tunnel Historic District

At 11,612 feet, the Alpine Tunnel Historic District preserves what was once North America’s highest narrow-gauge railroad tunnel. Completed in 1881 a few miles northeast of the small town of Pitkin, the tunnel helped connect Denver with the silver mines…

American Legion Hall (Eads)

The American Legion Hall at the Kiowa County Fairgrounds near Eads was a New Deal project built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937–38. The hall is one of the best-preserved WPA buildings in Eads and remains an important site for community…

Ammons Hall

Located on the northwest corner of the Oval on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Ammons Hall opened in 1922 as a women’s gymnasium and social center. Designed by Denver architect Eugene Groves, the Italian Renaissance Revival…

Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners Region

Formerly labeled Anasazi, the Ancestral Puebloan culture is the most widely known of the ancient cultures of Colorado. The people who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the great houses of Chaco Canyon were subsistence farmers of corn, beans,…

Animas Canyon Toll Road

The Animas Canyon Toll Road was built in 1876–78 to connect the mining town of Silverton to the coal beds and agricultural produce of the Animas Valley near what is now Durango. The roughly thirty-mile wagon road operated for about five years before it…

Animas Forks

Established in 1875 and occupied until the 1920s, Animas Forks is a ghost town northeast of Silverton in the San Juan Mountains. It sits at an elevation of about 11,200 feet. It survived primarily on the strength of speculative investment rather than…

Anne Evans Mountain Home

The Anne Evans Mountain Home is a rustic cottage built by Anne Evans at an elevation of about 8,200 feet on her family’s large ranch in the Upper Bear Creek watershed in eastern Clear Creek County. Completed in 1911, the house was notable for its…

Ashcroft

Located about eleven miles south of Aspen in Castle Creek Valley, Ashcroft was established in 1880 as a silver mining camp. It quickly grew to more than 2,000 residents and briefly rivaled Aspen, but it was already declining by the late 1880s because the…

Astor House Hotel

The Astor House Hotel stands at 822 Twelfth Street in the City of Golden. Built in 1867, the Astor House remains Colorado’s oldest standing hotel and an enduring reminder of Colorado’s commercial development. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s,…

Auraria (West Denver)

Now home to the tri-institutional campus of Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado–Denver, and Community College of Denver, the Auraria neighborhood has a long and rich history predating the founding of Denver itself. Auraria is…

Bain’s Department Store

In 1935 Joe Bain and his son, Victor, opened Bain’s Department Store on Main Street in Alamosa. After Bain’s closed, Victor Bain continued to own the building for decades, renting it out to a variety of automobile dealers and appliance shops. In 1994 the…

Barger Gulch Site

There are few places in western North America richer in Paleo-Indian archaeology than Middle Park, the valley that forms the headwaters of the Colorado River in Grand County. Within Middle Park, the Barger Gulch area preserves an impressive amount of…

Barney Ford's People's Restaurant

In 1863 the black pioneer Barney L. Ford built the People’s Restaurant at 1514 Blake Street in Denver. The success of the restaurant helped make Ford into one of the the state’s most influential black business and civic leaders. Although the building has…

Barr Trail

Barr Trail is a 12.6-mile trail that climbs about 7,500 feet from Manitou Springs to the summit of Pikes Peak, with an average grade of 11 percent. Surveyed and constructed by Fred Barr in 1918–21, Barr Trail was the first trail to reach the summit via…

Beatrice Willard Alpine Tundra Research Plots

The Beatrice Willard Alpine Tundra Research Plots were established in 1959 by Beatrice Willard at two high-altitude locations along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). Willard’s studies at the plots and elsewhere in the park were…

Beaumont Hotel

When it opened in 1887, the Beaumont Hotel in Ouray was one of the finest hotels in the Rocky Mountains. After several successful decades, its fortunes declined along with Ouray’s mining economy, and it eventually closed in the 1960s. In 2005 the hotel…

Beckwith Ranch

Located about five miles north of Westcliffe in the Wet Mountain Valley, Beckwith Ranch was established in 1870 by brothers Edwin and Elton Beckwith and grew to be one of the largest cattle operations in south-central Colorado. In the 1880s and 1890s the…

Bemis Hall

Constructed in 1908, Bemis Hall stands at 920 North Cascade Avenue in Colorado Springs. A three-and-a-half story dormitory building located on the Colorado College campus, Bemis Hall is historically significant as an early example of a coeducational…

Bent County Courthouse and Jail

The Bent County Courthouse, located on Courthouse Square in the county seat of Las Animas, opened in 1889 to serve as the county’s administrative and legal center. The county jail opened next to the courthouse in 1912 and was used for nearly a century to…

Bent's Forts

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, when the western United States was in a seemingly unending state of flux as people competed for dominance over the land and its resources, three men moved to what would eventually become southeastern Colorado and…

Bingham Rural Historic Landscape

Established in 1864, Bingham Rural Historic Landscape, also known as the Koeper-Doty Farm, stands at 49816 West Bingham Hill Road (CR50-E) in Bellvue, about five miles northwest of Fort Collins in unincorporated Larimer County. The property functioned as…

Black Forest Community Church

The Black Forest Community Church occupies a row of three buildings on the southeast corner of Shoup and Black Forest Roads in the rural community of Black Forest in northern El Paso County. The church had its origins in a Sunday school started in 1932,…

Boggsville

Founded in 1866 near the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatoire Rivers, Boggsville became the first permanent settlement in southeastern Colorado. Its residents pioneered irrigation and large-scale farming and ranching in the Arkansas Valley. The town…

Bonfils Memorial Theatre

The Bonfils Memorial Theatre on East Colfax Avenue was built by Helen Bonfils for the Denver Civic Theatre in 1953. As the first theater for live performances built in Denver in forty years, the cream-colored building staged more than 400 productions…

Boston Building

Located at 828 Seventeenth Street in Denver, the Boston Building opened in 1890. Hailed by early historian Jerome Smiley as “the first of the strictly modern office buildings” in the city, the Boston Building signaled the emergence of Seventeenth Street…

Bradford-Perley House

The Bradford-Perley House was originally built in about 1860 to serve as a station house along Robert Bradford’s wagon road to mining areas in the Rocky Mountains. Located in what is now Ken-Caryl Ranch southwest of Denver, the house later became the…

Breckenridge Historic District

Settled as a gold-mining camp in 1859, Breckenridge has gone through a series of booms and busts typical of Colorado’s mining towns. The advent of skiing in the 1960s revived the town after decades of stagnation, bringing modern development but also…

Bromley/Koizuma-Hishinuma Farm

Located near Bromley Lane and South Fifteenth Avenue in Brighton, the Bromley/Koizuma-Hishinuma Farm is significant for its association with an early Brighton civic leader as well as later Japanese American farmers in Adams County. Emmet Bromley first…

Broomfield Depot

The Broomfield Depot was built in 1909 to serve the Colorado & Southern and Denver & Interurban Railroads. It is a rare surviving example of a combination passenger and freight depot that also served both steam railroad and electric interurban…

Brown Palace Hotel

Financed by and named after the early Denver developer Henry C. Brown, the Brown Palace Hotel opened on Broadway in 1892 in an elegant triangular building that was the tallest in the city at the time. For much of the twentieth century the hotel was owned…

Buckhorn Exchange

Located at 1000 Osage Street, just south of Lincoln Park, the Buckhorn Exchange is Denver’s oldest operating restaurant. Established by Henry H. Zietz in 1893, the restaurant has occupied the same building for more than 120 years and is known for its…

Buffalo Peaks Ranch

Buffalo Peaks Ranch is one of the oldest ranches in South Park, with roots in Adolphe and Marie Guiraud’s 1862 homestead along the Middle Fork of the South Platte River between Hartsel and Fairplay. Over the next eighty years, three generations of the…

Buford School

The one-room Buford School (174-566 New Castle Buford Rd, Meeker, CO 81641) was built in 1902 and served local students for fifty years. After the building stopped being used as a school in 1952, it was renovated and converted into a community center. It…

Burlington Gymnasium

The Burlington Gymnasium was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1938–41 and served as a gym, auditorium, and community center until 1999. Located on Senter Avenue between Ninth and Eleventh Streets, the two-story Art Deco facility was…

Byers-Evans House

Built in 1883, the Byers-Evans House at 1310 Bannock Street in Denver is a Victorian mansion notable for its association with two of the city’s most influential early families. William Byers, who built the house, had established the city’s first…

Byron White US Courthouse

Opened in 1916 as the main Denver Post Office and Federal Building, this four-story Greek temple (1823 Stout Street) is Colorado’s finest Neoclassical Revival structure. It represented the growing role of the federal government in a city that now has one…

Calhan Paint Mines

Located near Calhan, about thirty-five miles northeast of Colorado Springs, the Calhan Paint Mines are an area of clay deposits that have seen extensive prehistoric habitation and historic quarrying of the clay for pottery and bricks. In the 1990s,…

California Gulch Superfund Site

Established by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1983, the California Gulch Superfund Site encompasses about eighteen square miles in central Lake County, including the city of Leadville. One of the nation’s first Superfund sites, it was…

Callahan House

Built in 1892 by local businessman James K. Sweeny, the Victorian mansion at Third and Terry Streets in Longmont was acquired by Thomas and Alice Callahan, two of the city’s leading residents, in 1896. The Callahans conducted extensive renovations and…

Camp Hale

Built in the Pando Valley north of Leadville in 1942, Camp Hale served as the training grounds for the US Army’s Tenth Mountain Division during World War II. Troops learned to ski, snowshoe, and climb at the camp, allowing them to perform important…

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

Stretching west and northwest from Cortez to the Utah border, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument was established in 2000 and boasts the densest collection of archaeological sites in the United States. An estimated 30,000 sites—including cliff…

Capilla de San Antonio de Padua (Lasauses)

Built in 1928–30, Capilla de San Antonio de Padua is a Catholic church in Lasauses in the San Luis Valley. Constructed in the Territorial Adobe style, the church incorporated one wall of an earlier church on the same site, which was built in 1880 but…

Capilla de San Isidro

Built in about 1894, Capilla de San Isidro is a Catholic church in Los Fuertes in the San Luis Valley. The church is dedicated to St. Isidore, the patron saint of farming, and continues to play an important role in the local community, with Mass…

Capilla de Viejo San Acacio

Founded in the 1850s or 1860s by Hispano settlers near the Culebra River, the Catholic Capilla de Viejo San Acacio in the San Luis Valley is the oldest non–Native American religious space in Colorado. Over the years the church has had many repairs and…

Cardinal Mill

Located about two miles west of Nederland in western Boulder County, the Cardinal Mill processed gold, silver, and tungsten ore from its parent mine, the Boulder County Tunnel, as well as other local mines between 1902 and 1942. The Cardinal Mill was an…

Casa Mayan

Between 1946 and 1973, the Casa Mayan (1020 Ninth Street) served as a restaurant in the Auraria neighborhood of west Denver as well as a family home and multicultural meeting place for writers, musicians, artists, athletes, architects, politicians, and…

Castlewood Dam

Built in 1890 along Cherry Creek south of Franktown, Castlewood Dam was meant to help irrigate Douglas County farms. In 1933 the dam gave way, unleashing a fifteen-foot surge of water on Denver and ultimately spurring development of the Cherry Creek Dam…

Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception

Completed in 1912, the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, was the result of decades of effort on the part of the city’s early Catholic community. Sometimes called the “Pinnacled Glory of the West,” the…

Cayton Ranger Station

The Cayton Ranger Station (also known as the Cayton Guard Station) sits just inside the White River National Forest, about eighteen miles south of Silt, Colorado. Built between 1909 and 1910 by James Grimshaw Cayton, one of the nation’s first rangers,…

Central City Opera House

Built in 1878, the Central City Opera House is the oldest opera house in Colorado. Though it declined along with Central City’s economy in the 1880s, it puttered along as a theater and movie house until owner Peter McFarlane finally closed its doors in…

Central City–Black Hawk Historic District

Central City and Black Hawk took shape during the boom years after John Gregory discovered gold on May 6, 1859, near the North Fork of Clear Creek in what is now Gilpin County. For much of the 1860s and 1870s, the area was the richest mining region in…

Chaco Canyon

In the eleventh century, Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico was the center of a Native American cultural region about the size of the state of Indiana. It encompassed most of southwestern Colorado, from Chimney Rock National Monument on the east to…

Cheesman Park

One of the jewels of Denver’s park and parkway system, Cheesman Park (1601 Race St, Denver, CO 80206) sits on land that originally served as the city’s first cemetery. In 1890 the cemetery was closed, many—but not all—graves were relocated, and a park…

Cherokee Ranch and Castle

Cherokee Ranch includes more than three thousand acres of land along US 85 near Sedalia in Douglas County. In the late nineteenth century, the land was homesteaded by the Blunt and Flower families. Denver businessman Charles Alfred Johnson acquired the…

Cheyenne County Jail

Built in 1894, the Cheyenne County Jail represented the young county’s dedication to law and order and helped instill a sense of civic pride. It is the only surviving jail designed by the important early Colorado architect Robert S. Roeschlaub. After a…

Chimney Rock

Located in the southwest corner of Colorado just north of the New Mexico border, the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area is home to hundreds of archaeological sites. One of these sites, the Chimney Rock Pueblo, is known for its dramatic setting high atop…

Church of the Holy Redeemer

Located at the southeast corner of East Twenty-Sixth Avenue and Williams Street in Denver’s Whittier neighborhood, the Church of the Holy Redeemer is a 1910 Gothic Revival building designed by the Denver architects Fisher and Fisher. The church was…

Churches Ranch

Originally established in 1863, Churches Ranch, also known as Long Lake Ranch Park, stands at 17999 West Sixtieth Avenue in Arvada. It is a typical example of a Ralston Valley farming and ranching operation. Churches Ranch is now owned by Denver Water,…

City Hall of Colorado City

The City Hall of Colorado City, located at 2902 West Colorado Avenue in what is now Colorado Springs, was built in 1888 to provide space for city offices, a jail, and a fire department for Old Colorado City. The building was used as a city hall for only…

City Park

Established in 1882, City Park is Denver’s largest urban park, occupying nearly 320 acres between East Seventeenth and East Twenty-Third Avenues from York Street to Colorado Boulevard. Designed primarily by civil engineers Henry Meryweather and Walter…

Civic Center

Named a National Historic Landmark in 2012, Civic Center is a complex of parks, civic buildings, and cultural institutions stretching between the State Capitol and the City and County Building in the heart of Denver. Plans for the complex, which was…

Cleora Cemetery

Cleora Cemetery is a historic four-and-a-half-acre burial ground located on a hill south of the Arkansas River about two miles southeast of downtown Salida. Originally associated with the short-lived town of Cleora, the cemetery received its first…

Cliff Palace

Located in an alcove on the east wall of Cliff Canyon in Mesa Verde National Park, Cliff Palace is a 150-room cliff dwelling built by Ancestral Pueblo people in the 1200s. Diné (Navajo), Nuche (Ute), Apache, and Pueblo people knew of the…

Cokedale Historic District

Nestled along Reilly Creek about eight miles west of Trinidad in Las Animas County, the Cokedale Historic District represents an excellent example of an early twentieth-century coal camp in the Raton Basin coalfield. In 1906 the American Smelting and…

Collegiate Peaks Stampede Rodeo Grounds

The Collegiate Peaks Stampede Rodeo Grounds southwest of Buena Vista was built in 1940 using funds from the Works Progress Administration. The rodeo grew out of Buena Vista’s annual Head Lettuce Day celebration and gradually developed into a two-day…

Colorado Building

The Colorado Building at 409 North Main Street in Pueblo was built in 1925 on the site of the former Grand Opera House. The four-story rectangular building housed many of Pueblo’s major artistic and commercial outfits throughout the twentieth century,…

Colorado Chautauqua

Established in 1898 on what was then a barren mesa south of Boulder, Colorado Chautauqua has been providing education and entertainment programs for well over a century. Originally founded by Texas educators, the Chautauqua in Boulder was part of a…

Colorado Salt Works

In 1866 the rancher and businessman Charles Hall added a kettle house and barn to his Colorado Salt Works in South Park. The only salt works and the second manufacturing facility built in Colorado, the buildings operated intermittently for several years…

Colorado Sanitary Canning Factory

The Colorado Sanitary Canning Factory at 224 North Main Street in Brighton was built in 1908 to serve as a processing facility for the growing South Platte agricultural community. The factory closed in 1936. Also known as the Brighton Prisoner of War…

Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind

The Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB) was established in Colorado Springs in 1874 and is the only school of its kind in the state. The school’s buildings, constructed largely in the early twentieth century, were designed by major local…

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at 30 West Dale Street was built in 1936 as a community center for the visual and performing arts. Originally designed by John Gaw Meem using a mix of Pueblo Revival and Art Deco styles, the Fine Arts Center houses…

Colorado State Capitol

Colorado’s iconic, gold-domed Capitol looks out over the city of Denver from atop Brown’s Bluff, exactly one mile above sea level. Built between 1886 and 1908, the Capitol’s exterior remains largely original, but the interior has been subject to…

Colorado State Fairgrounds

Opened in 1901, the Colorado State Fairgrounds in Pueblo have long played an important role in the state’s agriculture, education, and entertainment. Farmers and ranchers attend the fair to display their products, see new technologies and techniques, and…

Colorado State Museum

The Colorado State Museum (200 E. Fourteenth Avenue, Denver) opened in 1915 as the first stand-alone home for the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado). The last work of Frank E. Edbrooke, Colorado’s best-known architect of the late 1800s…

Colorado Women's Prison

The Colorado Women’s Prison in Cañon City was built in 1935, after three previous women’s buildings at the State Penitentiary had been appropriated for other uses. Standing just east of the penitentiary walls, the women’s prison housed female inmates…

Comanche Crossing

On August 15, 1870, the first permanent railroad link across the United States from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast was completed when the final spike was driven in the Kansas Pacific Railway at Comanche Crossing in northeast Colorado. The exact…

Concilio Superior

The Concilio Superior building in Antonito is the headquarters of La Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU; Society for the Mutual Protection of United Workers), a mutual-aid society established in 1900 to protect Hispano workers in…

Cortez High School

Cortez High School, built in 1909 at 121 East First Street in Cortez, was for decades the only public school serving kindergarten through high school in the city. In 1968 the school closed and became the home of school district offices. Today, a Kansas…

Cottonwood Cave

Located near Cottonwood Creek on the Uncompahgre Plateau in Montrose County, Cottonwood Cave is a prehistoric site from the Basketmaker II period (400 BCE–400 CE) of the Ancestral Puebloan tradition. Excavated in 1947 by Clarence T. Hurst, the cave…

Country Club Historic District

Denver’s Country Club Historic District has been one of the most prestigious and exclusive neighborhoods in Colorado for more than a century. Originally developed in conjunction with the Denver Country Club, which opened just to the south in 1904, the…

Cozens Ranch

Built in 1874 by pioneer homesteader William Zane Cozens, Cozens Ranch was an important early ranch and stage stop in the Fraser River valley in north-central Colorado. The ranch also served for nearly thirty years as the area’s main post office. The…

Cramer Archaeological Site

The Cramer Archaeological Site is an Apishapa phase site located near the mouth of Apishapa Canyon. Consisting of vertical stone slabs arranged to form at least two rooms, the site was probably used around 1250–1350 CE. In 1985–86 James Gunnerson…

Crawford and Louise Hill Mansion

Built in 1905–6, the Crawford and Louise Hill Mansion at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Sherman Street in Denver stands as one of three remaining mansions from the affluent neighborhood that occupied the Sherman-Grant Historic District prior to the…

Creede

The last of Colorado’s great silver strikes, the town of Creede boomed after its namesake, Nicholas Creede, discovered silver along Willow Creek in 1889. An estimated 10,000 people poured into the narrow valley before the Panic of 1893 sent the town into…

Creede Railroad Depot/Museum

The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG) built the Creede Railroad Depot in 1893 to handle freight and passenger traffic in the historic mining town of Creede. Located on the north end of town near the corner of Loma Avenue and Wall Street, the…

Crested Butte

Founded in 1878, Crested Butte is a former coal-mining town turned ski resort nestled in the Elk Mountains of northern Gunnison County. The town lies about twenty-eight miles north of the county seat of Gunnison and about the same distance south of Aspen…

Cripple Creek

Cripple Creek was the site of the last and greatest mining boom in Colorado, attracting tens of thousands of people to the western flank of Pikes Peak in the 1890s. After it was destroyed by fire in 1896, the town and surrounding mining district reached…

Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion

The Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion at 420 E. Eleventh Avenue in Denver is one of the oldest still-standing residences in the city. It was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth…

Crowley School

Built in 1914, the Crowley School is the one of the oldest public buildings in Crowley County. It served as a schoolhouse and hosted community events until 1962. After years of deterioration, the building received a major restoration in the 1990s and now…

Crystal Mill

Built in 1892, the Crystal Mill is a log-and-frame structure atop a rocky outcrop along the Crystal River in northwest Gunnison County. At the time of its construction, the “mill” served as a powerhouse for local silver mines, allowing both the mines and…

Daniels and Fisher Tower

Rising 330 feet above Sixteenth Street, the Daniels and Fisher Tower in Denver was based on St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and opened in 1911 as a beacon drawing shoppers to the adjacent Daniels and Fisher department store. The Daniels and Fisher…

Daniels Park

Daniels Park (8682 N Daniels Park Rd, Sedalia, CO 80135) is a unit of the Denver Mountain Parks system located in an area of grassy buttes and ravines just west of Castle Pines in Douglas County. First established with a thirty-eight-acre donation from…

David H. Moffat Private Car (“Marcia”)

The “Marcia” railroad car served as the private car of David H. Moffat (1839–1911), a prominent banker and builder of railroads in Colorado in the late nineteenth century. The luxurious car represents Moffat’s interest in railroads and his effort to tie…

De Beque House

The De Beque House was built in 1889 at 233 Denver Street in the town of De Beque, Mesa County. It was the home of Wallace A.E. de Beque, one of the town’s founders. The wood-frame house has remained mostly unchanged since de Beque’s death in 1930 and is…

Dearfield

Established on May 5, 1910, by a young entrepreneur named Oliver Toussaint Jackson, Dearfield was an agricultural colony for Black people about twenty-five miles southeast of Greeley. For two decades nearly 700 Black people worked to transform the…

Debus Farm

The Debus Farm is a historic sugar beet farm in Logan County, located north of the South Platte River near the intersection of US 138 and County Road 67. Founded by the German Russian Debus family in 1925, the farm is a prominent example of the…

Dent Site

Early colonists occupied Colorado’s rich and ecologically diverse landscapes in the waning millennia of our planet’s most recent major Ice Age, the Pleistocene, between 14,000 and 12,000 years. Our best-documented evidence for Colorado’s earliest hunter…

Denver City and County Building

Facing the State Capitol Building and completing the dominant east-west axis for Civic Center, Denver’s City and County Building (300 W. Colfax Avenue) is the grandest monument of Mayor Robert Speer’s City Beautiful efforts. The elegant neoclassical…

Denver City Cable Railway Building

The Denver City Cable Railway Building (1201 Eighteenth Street) was built in 1889 as the company’s new headquarters and wheelhouse for its system of cable cars. As a central piece of Denver’s large cable-car network, which was one of the most extensive…

Denver Country Club

Established in 1887, the Denver Country Club is one of the oldest, most exclusive private social clubs in the West. The 1904 clubhouse and its surrounding 142 acres of landscaping are significant features in the city of Denver, situated along Cherry…

Denver Mint

Established by Congress in 1862, the Denver Mint operated for more than four decades as an assay office, determining the quality of bullion but not producing any coins. In 1895 Congress authorized the mint to produce coins and also provided for a new…

Denver Orphans’ Home

The Denver Orphans’ Home (DOH) was organized in 1881 to help alleviate the critical problem of supporting dependent children by offering short-term shelter to the offspring of families of limited means in crisis, as well as caring for orphans and other…

Denver Performing Arts Complex

The Denver Performing Arts Complex (DPAC) is a four-block, twelve-acre site that features nearly 10,600 seats across the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre, Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Boettcher Concert Hall, Garner Galleria…

Denver Tramway Powerhouse

The Denver Tramway Powerhouse (1416 Platte Street) was built in 1901–4 to generate power for the Denver Tramway Company’s extensive network of electric streetcars. From a 1911 expansion until the last electric streetcar service in 1950, the powerhouse…

Department of Energy Grand Junction Office

Built in 1943, the Department of Energy Grand Junction Office, also known as the “Manhattan Engineer District Grand Junction Office” and the “Atomic Energy Commission Grand Junction Operations Office,” stands at 2591 Legacy Way in Grand Junction. During…

Devils Head Lookout

Located on a granite outcrop that is the highest point in the Rampart Range, the Devils Head Lookout has operated continuously as a US Forest Service fire lookout for more than a century. The first female fire lookout in the country, Helen Dowe, served…

Dickens Opera House

In 1881–82 rancher and businessman William Henry Dickens built the Dickens Opera House at the corner of Third and Main Streets in downtown Longmont. The two-story opera house, with Dickens’s Farmers National Bank on the first floor and an auditorium on…

Dinosaur Ridge

Stretching north from Morrison to just south of Golden, Dinosaur Ridge became famous for the dinosaur fossils and tracks discovered there in 1877. The discoveries, which included the world’s first known Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus fossils, helped launch…

Dolores Cave

Located in Dolores River Canyon in Montrose County, Dolores Cave was occupied by several different peoples from at least 600 BCE to 1400 CE. Subject to extensive looting in the early twentieth century, the site was professionally excavated in 1946 by…

Donovan Archaeological Site

Located about twenty miles south of the South Platte River in northeast Colorado, the Donovan Archaeological Site is a Late Prehistoric bison-processing area with evidence of multiple Upper Republican occupations between about 1000 and 1300 CE. The…

Doud House

Located at 750 Lafayette Street in Denver’s East Seventh Avenue Historic District, the Doud House was built in 1905 and occupied by the Doud family from 1906 to 1960. It is significant for its association with Dwight and Mamie Doud Eisenhower, who were…

Downtown Loveland Historic District

Centered on East Fourth Street, the Downtown Loveland Historic District comprises nine square blocks of the town’s original commercial district. Most of the district lies within the original town plat, and at least fourteen of its fifty-eight buildings…

Dransfeldt Building

The Dransfeldt Building at 3431–35 South Broadway in Englewood was built in 1924 by local farmer Hans Dransfeldt. The north side of the building was occupied by the Englewood Herald and Enterprise for nearly three decades, while the south side served as…

Draper Cave Archaeological Site

The Draper Cave Archaeological Site contains evidence of human occupation dating back to the Middle Archaic period (3000–1000 BCE). In 1972 the Denver chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society excavated the site under the supervision of Ivol K…

Driggs Mansion

Driggs Mansion is a one-story sandstone house in Unaweep Canyon that was built for Laurence Driggs around 1918. Constructed by Grand Junction stonemason Nunzio Grasso and his son, the house later served as a hunting retreat before parts of it were torn…

Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad

Rising about 2,800 feet over its famously scenic forty-five-mile route, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad was originally built in 1881–82 as part of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway’s effort to reach the mines of the San Juan Mountains…

Eads Community Church

Located at the intersection of Eleventh and Goff Streets in Eads, the Eads Community Church is the oldest, largest, and best-preserved religious building in Kiowa County. Construction on the building began in 1923 under William Stickney, but it was not…

East High School

Built in 1925, East High School (1545 Detroit Street, Denver) is a public school that exemplifies the City Beautiful Movement’s dedication to placing schools in generous park-like settings and making them lessons in distinctive design. East is…

Edward T. Taylor House

Longtime Colorado state senator and US Congressman Edward T. Taylor (1858–1941) built his house in downtown Glenwood Springs (903 Bennett Ave, Glenwood Springs, CO 81601) in 1904. Taylor lived in the house whenever he was in Colorado during the…

Egyptian Theatre

Built in 1928, the Egyptian Theatre in Delta was designed in the Egyptian Revival style by Denver architect Montana S. Fallis. The theater is perhaps best known as the site where the nationwide Depression-era “Bank Night” movie promotion began in 1933…

El Corazon de Trinidad National Historic District

El Corazon de Trinidad (“the heart of Trinidad”) National Historic District covers a particularly well-preserved portion of downtown Trinidad that includes many blocks of adobe and brick buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…

El Pomar Estate

The El Pomar Estate at 1661 Mesa Avenue in Colorado Springs was originally built in 1909 as a private residence for Grace Goodyear Depew. Following her death, prominent Colorado businessman and philanthropist Spencer Penrose purchased and improved the…

El Pueblo

Established in 1842, El Pueblo (301 N Union Ave, Pueblo, CO 81003) was an independent adobe trading post that operated at the site of the present-day city of Pueblo and was used by a diverse, multi-ethnic group of trappers, traders, women, and mountain…

Emmanuel Shearith Israel Chapel

Located at what was once the corner of Tenth and Lawrence Streets in the middle of the Auraria Higher Education Center, Emmanuel Shearith Israel Chapel is the oldest surviving religious building in Denver. Built in 1876–77 as the Emmanuel Episcopal…

Empire Chief Mine and Mill

The Empire Chief Mine and Mill site is an abandoned nineteenth-century metal mining complex in Hinsdale County, located several miles west of Lake City on the southern slope of Sheep Mountain (83 Sunny Ave, Empire, CO 80438). The mine was established in…

Englewood Post Office

The 1938 Englewood post office building on South Broadway is notable for its large lobby mural by Boardman Robinson (1876–1952), an important art educator, political cartoonist, and founder of the American mural movement. The work is Robinson’s only post…

Equitable Building

The Equitable Building (730 Seventeenth Street) is located in the heart of downtown Denver’s financial district. Built in 1892 as the town’s premier office structure, it arguably still is. It also signaled that eastern capitalists had begun focusing on…

Fairmount Cemetery

Fairmount Cemetery is Colorado’s most prominent and populous burial ground and mortuary. Founded in 1890 in southeast Denver, it is the city’s second-oldest active cemetery after Riverside (1876). Today the 280-acre cemetery is home to some 180,000…

Fairplay

Fairplay is one of Colorado’s oldest mining and ranching towns. Situated in South Park in the mountains of central Colorado, it was part of the homelands of the Nuche or Ute people when US settlement began in 1859 during the Colorado Gold Rush. Gold…

Fairplay Hotel

The Fairplay Hotel was designed in the Rustic style by architect William Bowman and completed in 1922. Located on the site of an earlier hotel at the prominent corner of Fifth and Main Streets, the Fairplay became the largest and oldest hotel in town,…

Falls Creek Rock Shelters Archaeological Site

The Falls Creek rock shelters are the most important archaeological discovery in the Durango area. Along with nearby Talus Village, they are type-sites for the Eastern Basketmaker II period (400 BCE–400 CE) of the Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) tradition,…

Far View Sites

The Far View group at Mesa Verde National Park consists of more than twenty sites, five of which have been excavated. Far View House began as an eleventh-century Great House and part of the region centered on Chaco Canyon. Many of the surrounding sites…

Farmers State Bank of Cope

Farmers State Bank of Cope (Washington County) opened in 1918 at the southwest corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The first and only bank that ever operated in Cope, Farmers State Bank was founded and led largely by local women until the Great…

First Baptist Church of Moffat

The First Baptist Church of Moffat is a two-story concrete-block building constructed in 1911 at the corner of Fourth and Lincoln Streets (401 Lincoln Avenue, Moffat, Colorado). In the 1920s, residents bought the church from the Baptist Association to…

Fitzsimons General Hospital

Established east of Denver in 1918, Fitzsimons General Hospital was originally established as an army hospital specializing in treating soldiers infected with tuberculosis during World War I. After struggling with small budgets and the threat of closure,…

Five Points

Bordered roughly by the South Platte River to the northwest, Thirty-Eighth Street to the north, Downing Street to the east, Park Avenue and East Twentieth Avenue to the south, and Twentieth Street to the southwest, Five Points is a historic neighborhood…

Flattop Butte

Located northwest of Sterling, Flattop Butte is a rock outcrop that was used extensively by prehistoric peoples as a source of stone for tools. The butte has a Chadron Formation capstone that is the only major bedrock source of high-quality stone between…

Florence Post Office

The Florence Post Office was built in 1936–37 as a Public Works Administration (PWA) project. The building has a simple Neoclassical design with some Art Deco details and a mural by Olive Rush in the lobby. In 1986 the post office was listed on the…

Fort Davy Crockett

Fort Davy Crockett was one of three known nineteenth-century forts and trading posts on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, in the drainage systems of the Green and Colorado Rivers. From the mid-1830s to 1840, Fort Davy Crockett, along with Fort…

Fort Garland

The US Army operated Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley for twenty-five years, from 1858 to 1883. The fort was built to protect early settlers from Native American raids in the years before treaties, reservations, and removal made that mission obsolete…

Fort Logan National Cemetery

Fort Logan National Cemetery is located at the intersection of South Sheridan Boulevard and West Kenyon Avenue in southwest Denver. It started in 1889 as the small post cemetery at Fort Logan. The fort was closed after World War II, but in 1950 the…

Fort Morgan State Armory

Built in 1922, the Fort Morgan State Armory is located at 528 State Street in Fort Morgan in northeast Colorado (528 State St, 80701 Fort Morgan, United States). It served as headquarters of Company M, Seventeenth Infantry of the Colorado National Guard…

Fort Peabody

Built on Imogene Pass during the Western Federation of Miners strike in Telluride in 1903–4, Fort Peabody was a Colorado National Guard post intended to prevent deported union members and activists from returning to Telluride via the pass. Named after…

Fort Uncompahgre

Fort Uncompahgre was constructed in 1828 by Antoine Robidoux, a trader based out of Mexican Santa Fé. The trading post was situated about two miles down from the confluence of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre Rivers near the present-day community of Delta in…

Fort Vasquez

Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette operated the fur-trading post Fort Vasquez from 1835 to 1842. After ruthless competition and changing trade patterns caused the pair to leave the fort, it served as a landmark along the South Platte River Trail before…

Four Mile House

Named for its location four miles from the intersection of Broadway and Colfax Avenue in Denver, Four Mile House was built in 1859 and served in the 1860s as the last stage stop before the city along the Smoky Hill Trail. When railroads replaced…

Francisco Plaza

The Fort Garland merchant John M. Francisco and his trading partner, Henry Daigre, built Francisco Plaza near the Cucharas River, at the site of present-day La Veta, in 1862. The first dwelling in the Cucharas Valley, the plaza served as a defensive fort…

Franktown Cave

Located two and a half miles southwest of Franktown, Franktown Cave is a prehistoric archaeological site in a large rockshelter that contained artifacts from prehistoric occupations over 8,000 years. Some of the findings include rare perishable artifacts…

Garden Park School

The Garden Park School is a one-story brick schoolhouse completed in 1895 to replace an earlier school that was destroyed by fire. Standing at a prominent bend in Garden Park Road about nine miles north of Cañon City, the school served local students…

Genesee Park

Genesee Park is a Denver Mountain Park that stretches from Clear Creek Canyon to Genesee Mountain in the Rocky Mountain foothills about five miles southwest of Golden. In addition to the 8,424-foot summit of Genesee Mountain, attractions at the 2,413…

Georgetown–Silver Plume Historic District

Located in the upper Clear Creek valley about forty-five miles west of Denver, the Georgetown–Silver Plume Historic District is one of the best preserved historic mining districts in Colorado. In the late nineteenth century, Georgetown thrived as the…

Given Institute

The Given Institute was an International Style conference and laboratory building designed by Harry Weese and built in 1972 at 100 East Francis Street in Aspen. Built on land that formerly belonged to Elizabeth Paepcke near Hallam Lake, the building was…

Glen Eyrie

Originally built in the early 1870s at the mouth of Queens Canyon in Colorado Springs, Glen Eyrie was home to city founder William Jackson Palmer. In the early twentieth century Palmer expanded the house into an elaborate stone castle, but he died soon…

Gold Hill

Gold Hill was established in 1859 as the first permanent mining camp in the Colorado mountains. Located at an elevation of about 8,300 feet in Boulder County, the town experienced several booms and busts before settling into a small-scale tourist economy…

Gordon Creek Burial Site

Discovered in 1963, the Gordon Creek Burial Site is a Paleo-Indian burial in the Roosevelt National Forest in north-central Colorado. The site, which dates to about 7700 BCE, contained the skeleton of a young woman and several artifacts apparently buried…

Governor’s Residence at Boettcher Mansion

Located at 400 Eighth Avenue in Denver, the Governor’s Residence at the Boettcher Mansion was originally built in 1908 for the Cheesman family. In 1924 Gladys Cheesman Evans sold the Colonial Revival residence to Claude K. Boettcher, who lived there with…

Granada War Relocation Center (Amache)

The federal government built the Granada War Relocation Center, also known as Camp Amache, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II. Fearing that Japanese Americans might sympathize with Japan and work against…

Grand Junction Depot

The Grand Junction Depot is a two-story Italian Renaissance railroad station built in 1906 to accommodate the city’s growing rail traffic. A downtown landmark, the building serves as a reminder of the important role that railroads—especially the Denver …

Grant-Humphreys Mansion

Exuding ornamentation and ostentation, Grant-Humphreys Mansion (770 Pennsylvania Street) is Denver's best-known Beaux-Arts neoclassical residence, combining Colonial Revival and Italian Renaissance elements. Prominently sited on the southwest shoulder of…

Grays Peak National Recreation Trail

The Grays Peak National Recreation Trail starts in Stevens Gulch, just south of the Bakerville exit off Interstate 70 in Clear Creek County, and climbs roughly 3,000 feet in 3.5 miles to reach the summit of Grays Peak (14,278 feet) on the Continental…

Great House

“Great House” refers to a class of ancient Ancestral Puebloan structures from the ninth through thirteenth century. Great Houses were monumental, geometrically formal constructions, with thick stone masonry walls made with careful craftsmanship. While…

Greeley Tribune Building

The Beaux-Arts Greeley Tribune Building opened in 1929 to house the operations of the Greeley Tribune, Weld County’s oldest newspaper. From 1937 until the mid-1950s, the building also contained the offices of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy…

Guggenheim Hall

Built in 1910, Guggenheim Hall is located on the northeast side of the Oval on the campus of Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins. As the headquarters of the school’s home economics program in the early twentieth century, the neoclassical…

Hackberry Springs

A perennial spring in a dry section of southeastern Colorado, Hackberry Springs has seen continuous human use for up to 7,000 years. The spring was also the site of the Battle of Bloody Springs, the last documented skirmish between Plains Indians and the…

Hagerman Mansion

Railroad magnate James John Hagerman built Hagerman Mansion in Colorado Springs in 1885. The Hagerman Mansion served as luxury housing for a family of Colorado Springs pioneers until 1899. Today the building is comprised of the original 1885 mansion, a…

Handy Chapel

Built in 1892 in downtown Grand Junction, Handy Chapel (200 White Ave, Grand Junction, CO 81501) is affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church but is legally owned by the black citizens of the city. In more than 120 years of existence,…

Hanging Flume

The hanging flume is a three-sided, six-foot-wide and four-foot-deep wooden trough that is suspended for ten miles along sandstone walls 150 feet or more above the San Miguel and Dolores Rivers. During late nineteenth-century gold rushes, many Western…

Harms Farm

Harms Farm is a historic agricultural property about two and a half miles north of Paoli in Phillips County. The 160-acre section around the main farmstead, which lies on the west side of County Road 21 between County Roads 30 and 32, was first claimed…

Harris Archaeological Site

The Harris Archaeological Site includes an Archaic period rockshelter first occupied at least 3,500 years ago, associated rock art, and a separate historic Ute campsite along a drainage on the eastern edge of the Uncompahgre Plateau. The site is named…

Hartman Gymnasium

The Hartman Gymnasium was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in about 1938–39 and quickly became an important center for athletic events and community gatherings. The school to which the gymnasium was originally attached was demolished in…

Hayden Ranch

Located about ten miles south of Leadville in the Upper Arkansas Valley, Hayden Ranch was one of the most important early agricultural operations in Lake County. Owned by the Hayden family from 1872 to 1933, the ranch raised hay and cattle for sale in…

Healy House and Dexter Cabin

A large white-clapboard residence in Leadville, Healy House was built for the family of mining engineer August Meyer in 1878. The house signaled the arrival of some domestic comforts to the rough-hewn mining camp. After the Meyers moved away in 1881, the…

Hildebrand Ranch

Settled by Frank Hildebrand in 1866, Hildebrand Ranch was a large cattle ranch and farm along Deer Creek southwest of Denver. After remaining in the hands of the Hildebrand family for more than a century, the ranch was condemned by the Army Corps of…

Hiwan Heritage Park and Museum

Hiwan Heritage Park and Museum in Evergreen comprises a four-acre outdoor space and a twenty-five-room log cabin. Josepha Williams, one of the first female doctors in Colorado, acquired the property in 1893 as a place for friends and family to stay…

Holly City Hall

Located at the corner of East Cheyenne and South Third Streets, the Holly City Hall was built in 1938 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project designed to consolidate the town of Holly’s administrative offices and departments. It never…

Holly Gymnasium

The Holly Gymnasium was built in 1936–38 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The two-story Modernist building is made of local Niobrara limestone and was the only gymnasium in Holly until a new school complex was constructed in 1965. Since…

Holly Santa Fe Depot (Town Hall)

The Holly train depot opened in 1912, at the height of the eastern plains agricultural boom after the early twentieth-century introduction of sugar beets. For decades the depot linked farmers and consumers to the rest of the country by rail, allowing…

Holy Ghost Catholic Church

Located at 1900 California Street in Denver, Holy Ghost Catholic Church is known for its long tradition of ministering to downtown Denver’s poor and homeless, as well as for its Renaissance-style church building designed in 1923 by Jules Jacques Benois…

Homestead

Editor's note: This article was updated by CE staff on 5/19/20 to include impact on indigenous people Homesteading was the means by which large amounts of land in the Midwest and western United States came under private ownership after it was…

Hornbek House

Built in 1878, the Hornbek House in Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument is significant for its association with Adeline Hornbek, a single mother who started a ranch in the Florissant area and lived in the house for twenty-seven years. The large one…

Hose Company No. 1

One of Denver’s earliest firehouses, the Hose Company No. 1 building was built in the 1880s and has since served as a print shop, welding shop, and storage facility. It will soon reopen as a restaurant for a new hotel. The preservation of Hose Company No…

Hotel Boulderado

Hotel Boulderado is located at 2115 Thirteenth Street in Boulder. Since opening its doors in 1909, it has stood as a luxury hotel and community-gathering place as well as a statement of civic pride. The hotel was built by the Boulder Hotel Company, a…

Hotel Jerome

Built in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler (1841–1918), the Hotel Jerome was Aspen’s original luxury hotel. After the 1893 silver crash destroyed the town’s economy, the hotel survived as a boardinghouse and slipped into comfortable shabbiness. When Aspen…

Hover Home and Farmstead

The Hover Home and Farmstead is a historic mansion and agricultural property on the west edge of Longmont. Retired pharmacist Charles Hover and his wife, Katherine, bought the farm in 1902 and built the mansion in 1913–14. Over the next several decades,…

Howelsen Hill

Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs is the oldest ski area in continuing use in Colorado and one of the few international ski jump competition sites in the United States. Built in 1915 by skiing pioneer Carl Howelsen (1877–1955) and the Steamboat Springs…

Hugo Municipal Pool

Located at the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue in Hugo, the Hugo Municipal Pool was built in 1936–38 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project designed to provide employment and improve quality of life during the Great Depression. The…

Ideal Building

Denver’s eight-story Ideal Building (821 Seventeenth Street) claims to be the first major building west of the Mississippi River constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. Built in 1907, it originally housed Charles Boettcher’s Ideal Cement Company…

Iglesia de la Inmaculada Concepción

Located in Chama in the San Luis Valley, Iglesia de la Inmaculada Concepción (Church of the Immaculate Conception) is a Catholic church built in 1938 under the supervision of Father Onofre Martorell. It continues to serve as an important community center…

Iglesia de San Francisco de Assisi

Located in San Francisco in the southeastern San Luis Valley, Iglesia de San Francisco de Assisi is a Catholic church featuring Gothic and Mission Revival elements. Constructed in the 1950s using concrete blocks and casement windows, the building shows…

Iglesia de San Pedro y San Pablo

Located in San Pedro in the San Luis Valley, Iglesia de San Pedro y San Pablo (Church of St. Peter and St. Paul) is a Catholic church built in 1933–34 under the supervision of Father Onofre Martorell. The cruciform-plan Territorial Adobe building…

Independence

Located just west of Independence Pass at an elevation of about 10,900 feet, the town of Independence was established in 1879 and boomed briefly in the early 1880s, reaching an estimated population of 1,500. In the mid-1880s, the town’s harsh climate and…

Indian Grove

Indian Grove consists of seventy-two ponderosa pines in Great Sand Dunes National Park that were peeled by Indigenous people in the 1800s to get bark for food, medicine, and other uses. First recorded in the 1970s by archaeologist Marilyn Martorano,…

Inter-Laken Hotel

Originally established in 1879 as the Lakeside Resort, the Inter-Laken Hotel was developed by James V. Dexter into a high-class, late nineteenth-century resort near Twin Lakes. Popular for about two decades, the hotel declined and eventually closed in…

J Bar Double C Ranch

The Denver Jewish Community Center (JCC) established J Bar Double C Ranch in 1952. The next summer the ranch, also known as JCC Ranch, began to host JCC Ranch Camp, Colorado’s second Jewish summer camp and the state’s first summer camp with a kosher…

J. S. Brown Mercantile Building (Wynkoop Brewing Company)

This five-story. red-brick building in Denver went up in 1899 for John Sidney Brown’s wholesale grocery business. Strategically located at 1634 Eighteenth Street—across Wynkoop Street from Union Station—it was next to the rail lines it depended on for…

Jackson County Courthouse

Built in 1913, the three-story Jackson County Courthouse in Walden is the most important building in the county. Designed by the prominent early twentieth-century Denver architect William N. Bowman (1868–1944), the building continues to house most county…

Jamaica Primary School

Jamaica Primary School is a midcentury elementary school designed by Atchison & Kloverstrom that opened in Aurora’s Havana Park neighborhood in 1958. Part of a massive school-building effort by Aurora Public Schools to keep up with the city’s booming…

Jones-Miller Bison Kill Site

Located in a shallow draw near the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado, the Jones-Miller Bison Kill Site was discovered in 1972 by the rancher Robert B. Jones Jr. and excavated over the next three years by Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian…

Julesburg Public Library

Located at the corner of East Fourth and Cedar Streets, the Julesburg Public Library was built in 1937, after the Julesburg Woman’s Club led a long-term effort to get a permanent library building for the community. Designed by Stanley Morse in the Art…

Julesburg Union Pacific Depot

Completed in 1930, the Union Pacific Railroad depot in Julesburg is a reminder of the town’s long-standing ties to the railroad. In the 1860s Julesburg served briefly as the end-of-track town when the Union Pacific was building its transcontinental line…

Jurgens Archaeological Site

The Jurgens Archaeological Site is a Paleo-Indian period (before 6000 BCE) bison processing site that dates to about 7120 BCE and includes the remains of at least sixty-eight bison spread across three separate camps. Located about nine miles east of…

Justina Ford House

Built in 1890 at 2335 Arapahoe Street in Denver, the Justina Ford House served for forty years as the home and office of Colorado’s first black woman physician. In 1984 the house was moved to save it from demolition, and after renovations it opened at…

Kaplan-Hoover Bison Kill Site

The Kaplan-Hoover Bison Kill Site west of Windsor preserves one of the largest single-event Archaic arroyo kills ever found. Discovered in 1997 during construction of a housing development, the site was excavated by a Colorado State University (CSU) team…

Ken-Caryl South Valley Archaeological District

Located just north of Deer Creek in the valley between the hogback ridge and the foothills west of Denver, the Ken-Caryl South Valley Archaeological District contains rock shelters that were used by prehistoric peoples from at least the Late Paleo-Indian…

Kennicott Cabin

Located about three miles north of Westcliffe in the Wet Mountain Valley, the Kennicott Cabin is a rare example of a two-story log cabin and is significant for its association with the early settlement of the area. Frank Kennicott built the cabin on his…

Kewclaw Archaeological Site

Located in Battlement Mesa, the Kewclaw Archaeological Site contains the best-preserved Archaic period (5500 BCE–150 CE) structure in Colorado. Dating to at least 1095 BCE, the Kewclaw pithouse was built in a resource-rich area that would have allowed a…

Key Savings and Loan Association Building

The Key Savings and Loan Association Building at the southwest corner of South Broadway and West Hampden Avenue in Englewood was designed by modernist architect Charles Deaton and constructed in 1966–67. A striking concrete ovoid shell with a glass…

Kuner-Empson Cannery

The Kuner-Empson Cannery at Third and Martin Streets in Longmont canned vegetables from farms on the northern Front Range from 1892 to 1970. Originally built by industrialist John H. Empson in 1889, the cannery was one of the first major industrial sites…

La Casa Ruibalid

Built sometime in the 1880s or 1890s, La Casa Ruibalid is a Territorial adobe house on the Rio Blanco about ten miles south of Pagosa Springs. Believed to be the second house built in the Rio Blanco area, it was occupied throughout the first half of the…

La Junta City Park

La Junta City Park is a prime example of a New Deal project on Colorado’s eastern plains. As a result of work carried out between 1933 and 1941, a poorly drained park became the city’s primary outdoor recreation space, complete with stone walls, benches,…

Lake Agnes Cabin

Lake Agnes Cabin is a one-room log cabin about a half-mile north of Lake Agnes in the Never Summer Mountains. Built in 1925, the cabin was intended to provide accommodations for a boys’ summer camp and was later used by forest rangers in the area. Today…

Lake City

At an elevation of 8,661 feet in the heart of the San Juan Mountains, the historic mining town of Lake City is the only incorporated town in Hinsdale County. Named for nearby Lake San Cristobal, the town was founded in 1874 in a broad valley along the…

Lamar Post Office

The Lamar Post Office was built in 1936 as a Public Works Administration (PWA) project. Designed by Pueblo architect Walter DeMordaunt, the building is the only Spanish Colonial Revival post office built as part of the New Deal in Colorado. It is still…

Lamb Spring Archaeological Site

Located in Douglas County southeast of Chatfield State Park, the Lamb Spring Archaeological Site is the only major site with Paleo-Indian (before 6000 BCE) deposits in the metropolitan Denver area. First excavated in 1961–62, the site contains bison and…

Lands End Observatory

Perched on the edge of Grand Mesa in western Colorado’s Mesa County, the Lands End Observatory was built in 1936–37 and gives visitors a spectacular view of the Gunnison and Grand River Valleys, the Uncompahgre Plateau, the San Juan Mountains, and the La…

Lariat Trail Scenic Mountain Drive

Planned and built by William “Cement Bill” Williams from about 1910 to 1914, the Lariat Trail Scenic Mountain Drive winds roughly five miles and 1,500 feet from Golden to the top of Lookout Mountain. One of the earliest scenic mountain drives in Colorado…

Larimer Square

Located in the heart of downtown Denver, Larimer Square refers to the 1400 block of Larimer Street, which was named for the city’s founder and served as its main street for more than three decades. By the 1890s, Sixteenth Street became the city’s top…

Leadville

At an elevation of 10,152 feet in the central Rocky Mountains, Leadville is the Lake County seat and the highest incorporated city in the United States. Gold first brought prospectors to the area in the early 1860s, but Leadville itself was not…

Leadville Ice Palace

The Leadville Ice Palace was an enormous, ice-walled building with an exterior in the style of a Norman castle and an interior comprising a large skating rink and two ballrooms. Proposed and constructed in late 1895, the Ice Palace hosted a Crystal…

Leadville National Fish Hatchery

The Leadville National Fish Hatchery was established in 1889 at the base of Mt. Massive and has raised fish to stock the country’s inland waterways for more than 125 years. After successfully eliminating a whirling disease outbreak in the early 2000s,…

Leslie J. Savage Library

The Leslie J. Savage Library at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison is a Spanish Colonial Revival–style building designed by Temple Hoyne Buell and built in 1938–39. Funded in part by the Public Works Administration (PWA), the library included…

Limon Railroad Depot

The Limon Railroad Depot was built in 1910 on a triangular piece of land bounded by the intersection of Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad (CRI&P) and Union Pacific Railroad (UP) lines. The interchange made Limon, in Lincoln County, an…

Lincoln Hills

Located along South Boulder Creek about ten miles due west of Eldorado Springs and an hour’s drive from downtown Denver, Lincoln Hills was established in the 1920s as one of a small handful of black resorts in the United States and the only one west of…

Lincoln Home

The Lincoln Home in Pueblo was started by the city’s Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and became the only known Black orphanage in Colorado. Established in 1906, the home moved in 1914 to two connected brick houses on North Grand Avenue, where it…

Lincoln School

Lincoln School was an important early school complex on the 300 block between West Second and West Third Streets in La Junta. Built in three phases, the complex started in 1883 with a stone building, was enlarged in 1903–4 with a red brick addition, and…

Lindenmeier Folsom Site

Lindenmeier is a large Native American archaeological site dating to the end of the Pleistocene epoch, or Ice Age, in northern Larimer County. The site contains stone tools and animal bones interpreted by archaeologists as the fragmentary remains of an…

LoDaisKa Archaeological Site

First excavated in 1956–57, the LoDaisKa Archaeological Site south of Morrison is a rockshelter that contains evidence of about 7,500 years of human occupation, from the Paleo-Indian period (before 6000 BCE) to the Early Ceramic (150–1150 CE). The site…

Lodore School

Built in 1911, the Lodore School is located off Colorado State Highway 318 in what is now Browns Park National Wildlife Refuge in Moffat County. The building has served as a rural community center throughout its existence and also functioned as a…

Long House

Long House is the second-largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park. Built by Ancestral Puebloans in the 1200s, the 150-room dwelling was rediscovered by the Wetherill brothers and Charles Mason in early 1890. In the late 1950s and early 1960s,…

Longmont Carnegie Library

Built in 1913, the Carnegie Library at Fourth and Kimbark Streets in Longmont served as the city’s public library until 1972, when it was remodeled to house city offices. The Longmont Carnegie Library was one of thousands of similar libraries donated to…

Longmont College / The Landmark

Built in 1886, Longmont College, also known as The Landmark, was the first institute of higher education in Longmont and the St. Vrain Valley. The Presbyterian Synod of Colorado founded the college in 1885 with plans to build a massive Italianate-style…

Longmont Historic Districts

The East and West Side Historic Districts in Longmont are located east and west of Main Street and south of Longs Peak Avenue. They contain many of the city’s earliest homes. The East Side Historic District includes 67 historic houses and was added to…

Lorraine Lodge/Boettcher Mansion

Charles Boettcher (1852–1948), one of Colorado’s most important early businessmen and philanthropists, built Lorraine Lodge (now known as Boettcher Mansion) in 1917 as a summer retreat at the top of Lookout Mountain, west of Golden. It stands as a…

Los Piños Indian Agency

After the Treaty of 1868, the Los Piños Indian Agency became the center of governmental authority for the Uncompahgre Utes on the Ute Indian Reservation in western Colorado. While largely forgotten after its abandonment in 1881, the site of the second…

Lost Trail Ranch

Lost Trail Ranch was established in 1877 as a way station and resupply spot along Stony Pass Road from the San Luis Valley to the mining camps of the San Juan Mountains. Located at an elevation of 9,800 feet along the Rio Grande, the way station served…

Louviers

Originally established as a Du Pont company town in 1906–8, Louviers Village south of Denver is distinctive in Colorado because it was never associated with either agriculture or mining. Planned by Du Pont as a model community to attract long-term…

Loveland C&S Rail Depot

Whether it was stagecoaches on the Overland Trail, steam locomotives bringing crops to market, or automobiles carrying tourists to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park, the city of Loveland has long served as a transportation hub along Colorado’s Front…

Lowry Site

Named for early homesteader George Lowry, the Lowry ruin near Cortez (Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, County Rd 7.25, Pleasant View, CO 81331) is a pueblo with thirty-seven rooms, eight kivas, and one Great Kiva. Built between about 1090 and…

Lyons Sandstone

Named for the Boulder County town whose historic quarries made it famous, the Lyons Sandstone formation is a Permian age rock layer in the foothills of the Front Range from the Wyoming border to south of Colorado Springs. It is the primary formation in…

Magic Mountain Archaeological Site

Named for a nearby amusement park now known as Heritage Square, the Magic Mountain Archaeological Site south of Golden was excavated in 1959–60 by Cynthia and Henry Irwin. Because it was one of the first foothills sites to be professionally excavated,…

Manitou Experimental Forest Station

Located about seven miles north of Woodland Park, the Manitou Experimental Forest Station was established in 1936 for the US Forest Service to study resource management in ponderosa pine lands. Along with the Fraser Experimental Forest, it is one of two…

Manitou Springs Spa Building

The Manitou Springs Spa Building stands on top of Soda (or Manitou) Spring on the north bank of Fountain Creek in downtown Manitou Springs. The three-story Spanish Colonial Revival building was built in 1920 to help revive Manitou’s sagging health…

Mantle's Cave

Mantle’s Cave is the most important Fremont period archaeological site excavated in northwestern Colorado. Artifacts recovered from the cave were instrumental in defining the Fremont culture. Because the cave is dry, artifacts that are not usually seen…

Marble Jailhouse

The Marble Jailhouse was built on East State Street in 1901, as local officials tried to impose order on the growing town and its increasingly diverse working class. The one-room jailhouse, which contains two steel-framed jail cells, was most active…

Marble Mill Site

The deposits in the Crystal River valley are the only major source of marble in Colorado. Quarries in the area were developed most extensively by Channing Meek’s Colorado Yule Marble Company, which constructed a vast marble mill that operated from 1907…

Matchless Mine

One of the most famous mines in Colorado, the Matchless Mine in the Leadville Mining District produced millions of dollars’ worth of silver for its owner, Horace Tabor, in the early 1880s. The mine is perhaps best known, however, as the home of Horace…

Mesa Schoolhouse

The bright-red Mesa Schoolhouse, located off US 40 about two miles south of Steamboat Springs, is among the oldest examples of a one-story wood-frame school building still standing in Colorado. Built in 1916 by Arthur Gumprecht, the schoolhouse served…

Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde National Park was established on June 29, 1906. It is the largest of the National Park Service parcels protecting cultural resources in Colorado, with nearly 5,000 documented sites, including about 600 cliff dwellings. A majority of the…

Mesa Verde National Park Administrative District

The Mesa Verde National Park Administrative District consists of six Pueblo Revival structures originally built by park superintendent Jesse Nusbaum along the rim of Spruce Tree Canyon in the 1920s. The buildings were the first in the National Park…

Midland Roundhouse

Located at the corner of South Twenty-First Street and US Highway 24 on the west side of Colorado Springs, the Midland Roundhouse is a relatively rare example of a surviving nineteenth-century railroad roundhouse that has been adapted to a new use. Built…

Miller House

Located at 409 East Cleveland Street in Lafayette, the Miller House was the longtime home of town founder Mary Miller. In 1983 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today the one-story house remains a private, single-family residence…

Milne Farm

First established in the 1880s as a homestead associated with the Greeley agricultural colony, Milne Farm sits just west of Lucerne in Weld County. The Milne family has owned the farm continuously for more than 125 years and has long been involved in…

Minnequa Steelworks Office

Built by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) in 1901–2, the Minnequa Steelworks office building and medical dispensary in Pueblo are among the best examples of Mission-style architecture in Colorado. The dispensary helped provide healthcare to…

Montezuma Schoolhouse

The Montezuma Schoolhouse was built in 1884 on the east side of the mining town of Montezuma. The one-room schoolhouse replaced an earlier school building and was intended to accommodate the area’s growing population during that decade’s silver boom. The…

Montoya Ranch

Located near the Huerfano River about twenty miles northwest of Walsenburg, Montoya Ranch is a large adobe building originally built around 1869 by Hispano settlers in the area. It was later occupied by the Montoya family, who operated a sheep ranch, and…

Monument Valley Park

Monument Valley Park is a roughly two-mile linear park along Monument Creek in the heart of Colorado Springs. Developed and donated to the city by William Jackson Palmer, the 165-acre park opened in 1907 and has been one of the city’s most popular…

Morefield Mound

Morefield Mound sits in the middle of the wide valley at the bottom of Morefield Canyon in Mesa Verde National Park. It served as a water supply for ancient Native Americans a thousand years ago, making it one of the earliest known domestic water-supply…

Morgan County Courthouse and Jail

Morgan County’s 1921 jail and 1936 courthouse in Fort Morgan replaced the county’s original facilities after the county had outgrown them. The courthouse was funded by the Public Works Administration (PWA) and designed by the modernist Colorado architect…

Morrison

Morrison is a small tourist-oriented town of restaurants and antique shops located along Bear Creek in the valley south of Red Rocks, about fifteen miles southwest of Denver. Established in 1872, the town relied on George Morrison’s quarrying industry in…

Mount Vernon

The town of Mount Vernon was established in 1859 at the base of Mount Vernon Canyon, west of Denver. The town is best known as the home of Robert W. Steele, who made it the de facto capital of the unofficial Territory of Jefferson while he was governor…

Mountaineer Archaeological Site

Discovered in 1994, the Mountaineer Archaeological Site consists of more than sixty clusters of prehistoric artifacts on top of Tenderfoot Mountain near Gunnison. The most significant discovery at the site has been structures dating to the Paleo-Indian…

Ninth Street

Ninth Street Historic Park is the heart of the Auraria neighborhood, Denver’s oldest, founded in October 1858, a month before Denver City. In the late 1960s, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) planned to clear 169 acres of old Auraria bordering…

Notch Mountain Shelter

The Notch Mountain Shelter was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933 as a shelter for pilgrims coming to see nearby Mount of the Holy Cross. Located on the south shoulder of Notch Mountain at an elevation of about 13,100 feet, the rustic…

Oil Spring

Located along Fourmile Creek (also known as Oil Creek) about six miles north of Cañon City, Oil Spring is a shallow oil seep that was the site of the first commercial oil production in Colorado. Primarily active from 1860 to 1881, the seep produced at…

Olsen-Chubbuck Bison Kill Site

Dating to roughly 8200 BCE, the Olsen-Chubbuck Bison Kill Site in Cheyenne County preserves evidence of a Paleo-Indian kill of more than 190 bison. The site was named for the amateur archaeologists Jerry Chubbuck and Sigurd Olsen, who discovered and…

Oltjenbruns Farm

Oltjenbruns Farm is a historic agricultural property about two and a half miles southwest of Amherst in Phillips County. The 320 acres around the main farmstead, which lies on the west side of County Road 49 just north of Highway 23, was first claimed by…

Ouray (town)

The town of Ouray was founded in 1875 along the Uncompahgre River near where it runs north out of the San Juan Mountains. Two years after the Nuche (Ute) people were dispossessed by the Brunot Agreement in 1873, prospectors found silver and later gold in…

Overland Trail

The Overland Trail, also known as the "Central Overland Emigrant Route," was an important nineteenth-century corridor for explorers, colonists, miners, and traders that ran from Atchison, Kansas, to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. It followed preexisting…

Oxford Hotel

The Oxford Hotel (1600 Seventeenth Street) opened in 1891 and is now Denver’s oldest surviving hotel. Developed by brewer Adolph Zang and designed by architect Frank Edbrooke, the hotel originally provided a luxurious stay for travelers passing through…

Pagosa Springs

Home to the deepest hot spring aquifer in the world, Pagosa Springs was a popular destination for local Native Americans before it developed into a white settlement in the 1870s. The area supported a thriving lumber industry in the early twentieth…

Palmer Lake Star

The Palmer Lake Star at 500 Highland Road lies on a steep 58 percent slope of Sundance Mountain west of the Town of Palmer Lake. Built in 1935 to spur civic pride during the depths of the Great Depression, the 457-foot-wide star represents the star of…

Paramount Theater

The Paramount Theater (1621 Glenarm Place, Denver) is the best-known Art Deco design of architect Temple Hoyne Buell. Buell created this 1930 palace as the most ornate of all Colorado movie theaters and a gem in the coast-to-coast chain of exuberant…

Park Hill

Named for its site on a hill overlooking City Park, the Park Hill neighborhood in northeast Denver is bounded by Colorado Boulevard, East Colfax Avenue, Quebec Street, and East Fifty-Second Avenue. The area was first platted in 1887. As Park Hill matured…

Peck House

Built by James Peck in 1863, the Peck House in Empire was for many years the oldest hotel still operating in Colorado. An important Empire institution, the house began hosting stagecoach travelers and miners in the 1860s and became a formal hotel in 1872…

Pedro-Botz House

Built in 1904, the Pedro-Botz House is a log dwelling in the working-class community of Smeltertown, which developed near the Ohio and Colorado Smelter northwest of Salida. Occupied initially by the Hungarian Pedro family and later by the Yugoslavian…

Peoples Presbyterian Church

Peoples Presbyterian Church was founded in June 1906 and is Denver’s oldest continuously active black Presbyterian congregation. In 1908 the congregation acquired its first permanent home at the former First Cumberland Presbyterian building a few blocks…

Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp

Established by Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield in 1913, the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp near Steamboat Springs is the oldest continuously operated performing arts camp in the United States. In the early twentieth century, the…

Petticrew Stage Stop

Surrounded by prairie grass and juniper, the Petticrew Stage Stop stands approximately twenty-five miles south of Lamar in Prowers County. Built in the early 1890s by John L. Petticrew, the building served as a stop between Lamar and Springfield,…

Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel #6

Built in 1905 for Denver’s Elitch Gardens amusement park, Philadelphia Toboggan Company Carousel #6 has operated at the Kit Carson County Fairgrounds in Burlington since 1928. It is the oldest working carousel in Colorado, and its 1909 Wurlitzer organ is…

Pike’s Stockade

The Pike Stockade is a reconstruction of a small fortress built by the soldiers of the 1806–7 Zebulon Pike expedition. It is located on the Rio Conejos, a tributary of the Rio Grande, in the San Luis Valley, seventeen miles southeast of Alamosa…

Pine Hall

Pine Hall is the only historic false-front wood building remaining in Granite, a small town along the Arkansas River about halfway between Buena Vista and Leadville. Built in 1896 as a community center, the building later housed a variety of commercial…

Pleasant Park School

The Pleasant Park School is located at 22551 Pleasant Park Road, about three and a half miles southeast of Aspen Park in rural Jefferson County. Built by local families in 1894, the one-room school served Pleasant Park students until school consolidation…

Prehistoric Stone Quarrying in Colorado

From exquisitely flaked Folsom spear points to the spectacular cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park, among the most visible vestiges of Colorado’s Native American history are those crafted from naturally available rock. Archaeologists and others…

Prowers County Welfare Housing

The five-building Prowers County Welfare Housing complex on the north side of Lamar was built in 1938–41 as a series of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. The one-story sandstone buildings were the only New Deal public housing complex…

Raton Pass

At an elevation of 7,798 feet in the Raton Range on the border between Colorado and New Mexico, Raton Pass has served as an important transportation corridor since at least the start of the Santa Fé Trail in 1821. Despite being on the less popular…

Richthofen Castle

Richthofen Castle (7020 E. Twelfth Avenue) was completed in 1886 for Baron Walter von Richthofen and is now one of Denver’s oldest and most celebrated buildings. Thought to be the design of Denver architect Alexander Cazin, it is a Romanesque Revival…

Rim Rock Drive

Built primarily by New Deal work programs in the 1930s, Rim Rock Drive is a twenty-three-mile scenic road through Colorado National Monument. Connecting Fruita and Grand Junction, the road increased tourism to the monument by allowing travelers to drive…

Rio Grande Hotel

The Rio Grande Hotel was built in the spring of 1892, when Creede faced a severe housing shortage as thousands of prospectors arrived into town on the recently completed railroad. The hotel withstood the town’s major 1892 fire and is a rare example of an…

Roberts Ranch Buffalo Jump

The Roberts Ranch Buffalo Jump in northern Larimer County is a Protohistoric period (1540–1860 CE) bison kill and butchering site that dates to about 1663–84 and represents one of the southernmost bison jump sites on the Great Plains. Discovered in 1957,…

Rock Ledge Ranch (Buena Vista)

Established in 1887 by Ernest Wilber, Rock Ledge Ranch is a historic ranch four miles west of Buena Vista in the Upper Arkansas Valley (17975 Co Rd 338, Buena Vista, CO 81211). Since 1908 the ranch has been owned and operated by multiple generations of…

Rocky Mountain National Park Administration Building

The Rocky Mountain National Park Administration Building, also known as the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, is one of the most historically and architecturally significant National Park Service buildings in the country. It was listed as a National…

Romano Residence

The Romano Residence is a one-story Craftsman-style bungalow on South Golden Road in the Pleasant View neighborhood southeast of Golden (16300 S Golden Rd, Golden, CO 80401). Built in 1927, the cobblestone house has been in the Romano family since 1929…

Rooney Ranch

Established in 1861 between Green Mountain and the hogback known as Dinosaur Ridge, Rooney Ranch is the oldest property continuously operated by the same family in Jefferson County. It was also the county’s largest cattle ranch ever and has one of the…

Ross-Broadway Branch, Denver Public Library

The Ross-Broadway Branch of the Denver Public Library was built in 1950–51 using funds from the organization’s Frederick R. Ross Library Trust. Designed by Victor Hornbein, the building at the corner of East Bayaud Avenue and South Lincoln Street…

Rossonian Hotel

The most prominent building at the Five Points intersection in Denver, the Rossonian Hotel opened in 1912 as the Baxter Hotel. Renamed the Rossonian in 1929, its lounge acquired a reputation as the best jazz club between the Midwest and the West Coast,…

Roxborough State Park Archaeological District

The Roxborough State Park Archaeological District contains one historic homestead and a variety of prehistoric rockshelters and campsites dating back to at least the Early Archaic period (5500–3000 BCE). It is located at the southern end of the valley…

S. A. Wilson Elementary School

S. A. Wilson Elementary School is a midcentury school that opened in the Colorado Springs suburb of Security-Widefield in 1959. Originally built and soon expanded to help Security-Widefield accommodate a massive population increase during the decades…

Sacred Heart Cathedral

The Sacred Heart Cathedral at 1025 North Grand Avenue in Pueblo was dedicated as Sacred Heart Church in 1913. A rare example of Gothic Revival architecture in Pueblo, the cathedral demonstrates the continued importance of Catholicism in the history of…

Saguache

The town of Saguache in the northern San Luis Valley began as an agricultural community after Ute Indians were removed from the area in the 1860s. Saguache boomed in the 1870s and 1880s, when it became an important starting-off point for miners headed to…

Salida Steam Plant

The Salida steam plant was one of the first Edison electric plants in the country. Built in 1887 by the Salida Edison Electric Light Company, it operated until the 1950s. After 1989 the building was renovated and converted into a city-owned theater and…

San Rafael Presbyterian Church

Located in Mogote in the southern San Luis Valley (4907 Co Rd 9, Antonito, CO 81120), San Rafael Presbyterian Church was probably built in 1895–97 and used regularly until 1965. It is the second-oldest church in Conejos County and one of the few…

Sand Wash Basin Tool Stone Sites

Located northwest of Craig in Moffat County, the Sand Wash Basin is an area of Bridger Formation rock outcrops that prehistoric peoples mined extensively as a source for stones to make tools with. Bridger Formation chert is typically light to dark brown,…

Sculptured House

The Sculptured House was designed by modernist architect Charles Deaton and built in 1963–66 on Genesee Mountain west of Denver. Deaton’s only house design, the building is distinctive for its clamshell shape, which can be seen rising above Interstate 70…

Seventeen Mile House

Named for its location seventeen miles from the intersection of Broadway and Colfax Avenue in Denver, Seventeen Mile House operated in the 1860s and 1870s as a tavern and inn along the southern branch of the Smoky Hill Trail. After the arrival of the…

Shavano Valley Rock Art Site

Located on the eastern edge of the Uncompahgre Plateau near Montrose, the Shavano Valley Rock Art Site is one of the most important concentrations of rock art in western Colorado. Used from at least 1000 BCE to 1900 CE by Archaic and Nuche (Ute) peoples,…

Shenandoah-Dives Mill

Located two miles northeast of Silverton, the Shenandoah-Dives Mill (also known as the Mayflower Mill) was constructed in 1929 and became the longest-running mill in the San Juan Mountains. Operating most years from 1930 to 1991, the mill processed a…

Shield Cave Archaeological Site

Shield Cave is a large limestone cavern in Eagle County that contains painted rock art dating to the Historic period and deposits of the iron mineral pigment material used to make ochre-color paint. This site is one of hundreds of caverns that have…

Silverton

Silverton is a historic mining town established in 1874 in Baker’s Park in the heart of the San Juan Mountains. After the Denver & Rio Grande Railway (now the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad) reached the town in 1882, the surrounding…

Sim Hudson Motor Company

The Sim Hudson Motor Company at Thirteenth Street and Senter Avenue in Burlington (1332 Senter Ave.,Burlington, Colorado), the Kit Carson County seat, served as a car dealership and service center for more than eighty years. Built around 1919 as the…

Sisyphus Shelter Archaeological Site

The Sisyphus Shelter Archaeological Site was an Archaic period (5500 BCE–150 CE) rockshelter on the northwest side of the Colorado River between Parachute and De Beque. Before the shelter was destroyed by the construction of Interstate 70, it was…

Sixteenth Street (Denver)

Sixteenth Street has been Denver’s main street for shopping, commerce, and celebrations since the late nineteenth century. Starting from Broadway just north of Civic Center, it stretches about 1.75 miles northwest to Tejon Street in Highland. To help…

Smuggler-Union Hydroelectric Power Plant

The photogenic Smuggler-Union Hydroelectric Power Plant sits precariously near the top of Bridal Veil Falls near Telluride. It is the last structure left from the Smuggler-Union Mining Company, one of the state’s most important mineral producers in the…

Snake Blakeslee Archaeological Site

Located in Apishapa Canyon in southeastern Colorado, the Snake Blakeslee Archaeological Site consists of two residential room clusters and several outlying structures that apparently made up a single Apishapa phase (1050–1450 CE) community. First…

Solandt Memorial Hospital

Solandt Memorial Hospital in Hayden opened in 1923 as the first modern hospital in northwest Colorado. It operated as a hospital for more than forty years—for much of that time as the only accredited hospital in the region—before closing in the 1960s…

Spruce Tree House

Spruce Tree House is the third-largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park, and the first seen by most visitors because of its location near park headquarters. Built by the Ancestral Pueblo in the 1200s, Euro-Americans came to know&nbsp…

Squirrel Creek Recreation District

Developed primarily between 1919 and 1924, the Squirrel Creek Recreation District in the San Isabel National Forest near Pueblo was one of the earliest recreational developments in a national forest and served as a model for many others to come. The…

St. Cajetan’s Catholic Church

Located at what was once the corner of Ninth and Lawrence Streets (101 Lawrence Way, Denver, CO 80204) in the Auraria Higher Education Center, St. Cajetan’s Catholic Church was built in 1926 to serve the Latino community of west Denver. The first church…

St. Elmo

Located at an elevation of 10,000 feet in Chalk Creek Canyon southwest of Buena Vista, the historic mining town of St. Elmo was founded in 1880 and flourished for less than a decade. Although it is actually inhabited by a small handful of full-timers and…

St. Francis of Assisi Mission Church

Built in 1881, St. Francis of Assisi Mission Church is a Catholic church in Los Valdeses, a town along the Rio Grande about halfway between Del Norte and Monte Vista. One of the few Hispano churches in the San Luis Valley with a cruciform plan, St…

St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral

St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral (1350 Washington Street, Denver) was the first Episcopal congregation in Colorado and serves as the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. The 1911 cathedral is a fine example of the Late English Gothic style, and the…

St. Leo’s Catholic Church

Between 1888 and 1965, St. Leo’s Catholic Church at Tenth Street and West Colfax Avenue in West Denver was the primary center of worship for Irish Catholics in the city. From the time it was built, St. Leo’s faced controversy over its role in enforcing…

Staley-Rouse House

Located at 518 Main Street in Frisco, the Staley-Rouse House was built in 1908–9 for William and Alvarena Staley. The house is unique in Colorado for having a first floor made of vertical logs and a second floor of horizontal logs, which gives it a…

Stanley Arms

Located at the northwest corner of East 10th Avenue and North Lafayette Street in Denver, the Stanley Arms opened in 1937 as one of the city’s earliest examples of an International Style apartment building. The building is best known as the home of…

Stanley Hotel

Designed and funded by Freelan Oscar Stanley, the Stanley Hotel opened in 1909 in Estes Park. The first-class resort helped make Estes Park into a tourist destination, especially after the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915. In the…

State Armory (Craig)

Built in 1922, the State Armory in Craig was one of many new armories built to house national guard units across the state. The Craig building, based on a design by John James Huddart, served for many decades as a place for military training and…

State Bridge

State Bridge spans the Colorado River along Highway 131 in Eagle County and was originally constructed in 1890. Built with state funding, the bridge helped promote growth by providing the only east–west transportation link across the state that was open…

State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home

Located east of Monte Vista in the San Luis Valley (3694 Sherman Ave, Monte Vista, Colorado), the State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home was established in 1889 as a home for aging and disabled Civil War veterans in Colorado. The facility grew over the years…

Staunton Ranch

Located north of Shaffers Crossing about forty-five miles southwest of Denver, Staunton Ranch was a 1,720-acre ranch owned by the doctors Archibald and Rachael Staunton. The Stauntons used the ranch as a second home and also operated a sawmill and hosted…

Steamboat Springs Depot

The Steamboat Springs Depot was built in 1909, when the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railway arrived to connect the Yampa Valley with mineral, agricultural, and livestock markets in eastern Colorado and beyond. Abandoned in 1968 with the cessation…

Stewart’s Cattle Guard Archaeological Site

The Stewart’s Cattle Guard Archaeological Site in the San Luis Valley represents a late summer or early fall bison hunting camp occupied by Folsom peoples in the Paleo-Indian period (before 6000 BCE). The site was discovered in the late 1970s and…

Stranges Grocery

Located at 226 Pitkin Avenue in Grand Junction, Stranges Grocery is a two-story commercial building that housed one of four Italian groceries in the early twentieth century. Built in 1909 by local stonemason Nunzio Grasso, the grocery was owned and…

Summit Lake

Located at an elevation of 12,830 feet on Mt. Evans, Summit Lake is a forty-acre alpine lake known for its scenic beauty and unique ecosystem. Acquired by Denver in 1924 as part of the city’s system of mountain parks, it is the highest Denver park as…

Swanson Farm

Platted in 1902, the Gustav and Annie Swanson Farm stands at 1932 North Highway 287 in Berthoud. The farm is located along US Highway 287 roughly one-and-a-half miles north of downtown Berthoud at the intersection of CR-10E. The Swanson Farm is an…

Tabeguache Cave

Located southwest of Montrose, Tabeguache Cave was used during the Basketmaker II period (400 BCE–400 CE) of the Ancestral Puebloan tradition. Excavated in 1939–41 by the Colorado archaeologist Clarence T. Hurst, it was Hurst’s first excavation in the…

Tabor Opera House

The Tabor Opera House (308 Harrison Avenue, Leadville) was built by Horace Tabor in 1879 to bring high-class entertainment to the rough mining camp of Leadville. It was for a while one of the top theaters in the state. Horace Tabor had to sell the…

Telephone Building

Completed in 1929, the Telephone Building at 931 14th Street in Denver served for fifty-five years as the headquarters of Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph. Designed by architect William N. Bowman in a combination of Art Deco and Gothic Revival…

Teller House

Built in 1871–72 by brothers Henry M. Teller and Willard Teller, the Teller House is one of the oldest and most important buildings in Central City. It has served as the town’s main hotel for more than sixty years. The four-story brick hotel played…

Texas Creek Overlook Archaeological Site

The Texas Creek Overlook Archaeological Site is a picturesque Fremont masonry structure located on a sandstone pinnacle in the rugged canyons south of Rangely. In 1983 the overlook was excavated by Steven D. Creasman of Western Wyoming College in…

The Bee Family Farm

The Bee Family Farm is a historic farm located between Fort Collins and Wellington. In operation as a working farm since 1894, it is now an outdoor museum that preserves and displays the family’s historic artifacts, buildings, and fields to help visitors…

The Broadmoor

Perennially ranked one of the top resorts in the United States, the Broadmoor opened just southwest of Colorado Springs in 1918. Built on the site of a failed casino complex and upscale suburban development at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, the Broadmoor…

The Daniels School

Built in 1911, the Daniels School stands at the intersection of US Highway 60 and Weld County Road 25 in Milliken. As some of the only surviving brick schoolhouses in the state, the school and its teacherage served the educational needs of the area for…

The Fort

The Fort, an adobe restaurant just south of Morrison, was modeled on historic Bent’s Old Fort and built using traditional Hispano methods and materials. Designed by William Lumpkins, an architect internationally known for his work in the adobe and Pueblo…

Tigiwon Community House

The Tigiwon Community House was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1933–34 as a meeting spot for pilgrims coming to see Mount of the Holy Cross. Located along Tigiwon Road south of Minturn at an elevation of about 10,000 feet, the rustic…

Tivoli Brewery

Constructed in 1864, the Tivoli Brewery in Denver was the first brewery built in Colorado and the second in the nation. Over the course of its complex history, the brewery changed hands multiple times until it was abandoned in 1969. The Tivoli building…

Torres Cave Archaeological Site

The Torres Cave Archaeological Site is a rock shelter in the wall of a canyon south of La Junta. Excavated in 1977 by the Denver chapter of the Colorado Archaeological Society, the site was probably occupied over several centuries as a seasonal Plains…

Trail Ridge Road

Trail Ridge Road snakes roughly fifty miles across Rocky Mountain National Park, from Estes Park to Grand Lake. Planned and built from about 1929 to 1938, the road provided a safer route across the Continental Divide for the park’s growing number of…

Tramway Building (Hotel Teatro)

Completed in 1911, the Tramway Building (1100 Fourteenth Street, Denver) consists of a striking red-and-white tower and adjacent car barn that originally served as the headquarters of the powerful Denver Tramway Company. In 1956 Tramway sold the building…

Treat Hall

Located near the intersection of Montview Boulevard and Quebec Street on the east side of Denver, Treat Hall is a Richardsonian Romanesque academic building that served as the original home of Colorado Women’s College. Completed in 1909, the building was…

Tremont House Hotel

The Tremont House Hotel was established in the fall of 1859 near Cherry Creek in Auraria (later West Denver) and soon became one of Denver’s top hotels. In the 1880s, the hotel declined as flood-prone West Denver became home to immigrants and industry…

Trinchera Cave Archaeological District

Located about forty miles east of Trinidad, the Trinchera Cave Archaeological District is known primarily for its large assortment of well-preserved perishable artifacts, such as basketry and sandals. With diverse occupations ranging from the Paleo…

Trinity United Methodist Church

Amid the high-rises and parking lots of downtown Denver, Trinity United Methodist Church (1820 Broadway) is one of the few surviving churches. Since 1888 it has played a major role in the city’s religious, political, civic, cultural, and architectural…

Trout Creek Archaeological Site

Trout Creek in east Chaffee County is an extensive archaeological site exhibiting natural outcrops of colorful jaspers that were used for thousands of years as raw material for toolmaking by many different groups of Native Americans. It is one of the…

Trout Creek Ranch

Trout Creek Ranch has its origin in lands consolidated by English investors Edward Arthur and David Chalmers along Trout Creek in the 1870s. The ranch, which stretches for about four miles in the valley between Red Hill and Reinecker Ridge southeast of…

Trujillo Homesteads

Located in rural Alamosa County along the western boundary of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the Trujillo Homesteads were settled in the 1860s and 1870s by Teofilo Trujillo and his son, Pedro. The history of the homesteads illustrates the…

Turkey Creek Canyon Archaeological District

Located in the southern part of Fort Carson, the Turkey Creek Canyon Archaeological District contains abundant rock art and other prehistoric sites from the Middle Archaic to Diversification periods (roughly 2000 BCE–1500 CE). Much of the rock art…

Two Buttes Dam

Intended as a way to irrigate nearby farmland, Two Buttes Dam was built in 1909–10 on Two Buttes Creek, about seventeen miles northeast of Springfield. The resulting reservoir did not irrigate much land and was better used as a site for hunting, fishing,…

Union Station

Union Station, located in Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo) on Wynkoop Street between Eighteenth and Sixteenth Streets, is downtown Denver’s main transportation center. It opened in 1881 as the city’s first consolidated railroad depot, and a renovation…

US Air Force Academy Cadet Area

Built primarily between 1955 and 1959, the US Air Force Academy cadet area near Colorado Springs is the heart of the Air Force Academy campus and home of the school’s 4,000 undergraduates. Occupying a prominent hilltop location, the cadet area hosts most…

Ute Indian Museum

The Ute people, or as they call themselves, Nuche (The People), are Colorado’s longest continuous residents. Their rich cultural heritage and history is on display at the Ute Indian Museum. Nestled in the heart of traditional Uncompahgre Ute territory in…

Vail Pass

Located in the southern Gore Range at an elevation of 10,662 feet, Vail Pass has been the site of periodic human occupations for at least 8,000 years. The prehistoric camp probably served as a high-altitude base when the growing population of nearby…

Van Briggle Memorial Pottery Building

Built in 1907–8, the Van Briggle Memorial Pottery Building in Colorado Springs was designed by architect Nicolaas van den Arend to serve as the company’s salesroom, pottery plant, and headquarters. Incorporating more than 5,000 tile and terra cotta…

W. E. Heginbotham House

Completed in 1921, Holyoke banker William E. Heginbotham’s large Craftsman-style house with extensive gardens was long one of the most stylish residences in Phillips County. Upon his death in 1968, Heginbotham gave his house to the town of Holyoke, which…

Walter and Anna Zion Homestead

The Walter and Anna Zion Homestead is the only known surviving farm complex in eastern Colorado with original sod buildings. Located midway between Idalia and Vernon in Yuma County, the homestead was settled by the Zions in 1909, and the sod buildings…

Washington Park

Developed in the 1890s and early 1900s, Washington Park is a scenic recreational area occupying about 160 acres southeast of downtown Denver. Designed around a portion of City Ditch by landscape architects Reinhard Schuetze and Saco DeBoer, the park…

Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library

The Denver Public Library (DPL) has one of the nation’s largest and finest collections on the history of the American West. Created in 1935, the collection continues to grow and currently includes more than 250,000 cataloged books, architectural records,…

Western Hotel

The Western Hotel at 716 Cooper Avenue in Glenwood Springs started in 1887 as a one-story brick restaurant building. In the early twentieth century, the building was expanded under the ownership of the Bosco family, which began renting rooms there by the…

Westlake School

Built in 1902 in what was then western Adams County, the Westlake School on Lowell Boulevard in Broomfield educated students at a variety of levels until its final closure in 1990. Now in Broomfield County, the school building was a private residence for…

Westminster University

Westminster University at 3455 West 83rd Avenue in Westminster is an imposing, red Richardsonian Romanesque building that gave the city its name and still serves as an important local visual landmark. Started in 1892, the building languished before…

Wetmore Post Office

Built in 1879, the Wetmore Post Office building was originally the office, store, and home of Dr. John W. Walters and his wife, Margaret A. Walters. In 1896 Margaret Walters became the town’s postmistress and began to operate the post office out of the…

Wheeler Opera House

The merchant and investor Jerome B. Wheeler (1841–1918) built the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen in 1889, making it the third-largest opera house in Colorado at the time. As Aspen declined after the Panic of 1893 and the demonetization of silver, the…

Wheeler/Stallard House

The Wheeler/Stallard House is a three-story Queen Anne style residence built in 1888–89 by Jerome B. Wheeler on the west side of Aspen. Edgar and Mary Ella Stallard occupied the house from 1905 to 1945, when Walter Paepcke acquired it for use as overflow…

White River Ute Indian Agency

The White River Ute Agency at Meeker, Colorado was established at the same time as the first Los Piños Agency under provisions of the Treaty of 1868. The agency was intended to serve the White River Ute band as well as some of the other bands from…

Wilbur Thomas Shelter Archaeological Site

The Wilbur Thomas Shelter Archaeological Site is a rockshelter in northwest Weld County featuring evidence of at least six intermittent occupations stretching over 8,500 years. David A. Breternitz and graduate students from the University of Colorado…

Wild Horse School

The Wild Horse School was built in 1911–12 and served until 1964 as the only school in the town of Wild Horse (8513 State Hwy 40 287, Wild Horse, CO 80862), in Cheyenne County. Originally a two-room building, the schoolhouse was expanded when a separate…

Wiley Rock Schoolhouse

The Wiley Rock Schoolhouse, built by the Works Progress Administration in 1938, is located on Main Street in the Prowers County town of Wiley (603 Main Street in Wiley, Colorado). Originally built as an annex for the adjacent Wiley High School, Wiley…

Willow Creek Park

Willow Creek Park in southeast Lamar was built primarily by the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration from 1933 to 1938. Using local labor and materials, the New Deal agencies built a series of dams for flood mitigation and…

Willowcroft Manor

Willowcroft Manor was built in 1884 as the home of Littleton-area pioneer Joseph W. Bowles. Designed by early Colorado architect Robert S. Roeschlaub, the two-story stone house was on Bowles’s property near the southwest corner of what is now West Bowles…

Winks Lodge

Located near Pinecliffe, about ten miles due west of Eldorado Springs and an hour from Denver by car, Winks Lodge was the main hotel and social hub at Lincoln Hills, a historic black resort community in Gilpin County. Opened in 1928 by Denver businessman…

World’s Wonder View Tower

Built in 1926, the six-story World’s Wonder View Tower in Genoa served for many decades as a tourist attraction and way station along US Highway 24. Visitation declined after Interstate 70 rerouted traffic farther away from the tower in the 1970s, but…

Yarmony Archaeological Site

Located near the Colorado River north of State Bridge, the Yarmony Archaeological Site is a prehistoric habitation that saw at least five separate occupations during the Archaic period (6650 BCE–150 CE) and the Late Prehistoric period (150–1540 CE)…

Yucca House National Monument

Yucca House National Monument was established to protect and preserve a large Ancestral Pueblo village south of Cortez in the southwestern corner of Colorado. Yucca House is an important Ancestral Pueblo village based on its size, unique configurations,…

Zia Pueblo

The modern pueblo at Zia is one of nineteen in New Mexico that can trace some part of its history to residence in southwestern Colorado. Located on a mesa above the Jemez River about thirty-five miles northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the pueblo of…

Zion Baptist Church

Organized by former slaves on November 15, 1865, Zion Baptist Church is the oldest black congregation in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West. Since 1913, the church has occupied a large Romanesque Revival building at 933 East Ogden Street in Five Points…

“Little Rome”

“Little Rome” was a residential area in Henson, a San Juan mining camp a few miles west of Lake City that peaked in the 1890s. Henson is notable for being the site of an 1899 strike carried out at the Ute Ulay and Hidden Treasure mines by Italians…