Businesses

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 undergone extensive alterations since Ford’...

Tucked away in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Beaver Creek Resort has had a rich history since it first opened to the public in 1980. Located in Eagle County , Beaver Creek is a major ski resort owned and operated by Vail Associates. The valley that houses Beaver Creek Resort lies just south of Avon...

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 interior stuffed with Western memorabilia and...

Cave of the Winds, located in Williams Canyon a few miles northwest of Colorado Springs , is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Colorado. Two schoolboys are credited with discovering the cave in 1880, though various legends hold that Ute and Apache tribes knew about it for centuries...

The Chicago-Colorado Colony (1871–73) established the city of Longmont near the confluence of St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks in 1871. Financed by wealthy Chicagoans and consisting mostly of immigrants from the Midwest, the colony was an agricultural community that emphasized thrift, temperance, and...

Located in Lake County beside Fremont Pass, the Climax Molybdenum Mine started production in 1918 and grew to become the world’s largest underground mine. Deemed a national priority during World War II because of molybdenum’s importance in hardening steel, Climax continued to grow for a generation...

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 centuries, the castle-like mansion’s...

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 in the country, the building helped made the...

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 the second, served as an important community...

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, hosting club meetings and dinner dances as well...

Denver’s history is full of innovation and success associated with the emergence of air travel, but perhaps just as many ventures failed. Though Gray Goose Airways was ultimately unsuccessful, founder Jonathan Edward Caldwell was doggedly persistent in its development and displayed an unwavering...

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 District, which administered the Colorado–Big...

Located about nine miles west of Empire , the Henderson Molybdenum Mine was developed by American Metal Climax (AMAX) and opened in 1976 to work one of the world’s largest known molybdenum deposits. A conveyor belt for transporting ore connects the mine to a separate mill on the western side of the...

Hotel de Paris was an idealized imitation of a Norman inn and is older than the State of Colorado itself. A former cook, journalist, and miner, Frenchman Louis Dupuy (born Adolph François Gerard) established the hotel and restaurant on October 9, 1875, in the Powers Building, formerly occupied by...

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, the Hovers ran one of the most successful...

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 the early twentieth century as a series of...

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 curtain wall, the building is an excellent example...

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 travelers until the early 1880s, when...

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 CF&I’s thousands of workers, and the...

The Shenandoah-Dives Mining Company was active in the San Juan Mountains from the 1930s through the 1960s. As one of the largest mining operations in the region during the twentieth century, the company’s history exemplifies the boom and bust cycles and labor strife that were common in Colorado’s...

Colorado’s ski industry anchors the state’s thriving tourist economy. Built primarily on national forest lands, the state’s numerous ski resorts attract upwards of 12 million visitors annually, generating billions in revenue. Introduced to the state in the late nineteenth century, downhill skiing’s...

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 late twentieth century, the hotel gained...

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 property during the Panic of 1893 . It later was...

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 Revival styles, the Fort served as a...

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 to the University of Colorado , which...

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 components designed by Anne Van Briggle , the...

Based in Denver , Wonderbound was established in 2002 and has quickly grown into the second-largest professional dance company in Colorado. Originally called Ballet Nouveau Colorado and affiliated with a Broomfield -based dance school of the same name, in 2012–13 the company split with the dance...