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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…

Aspen

Aspen, located along the Roaring Fork River west of Independence Pass, is the county seat of Pitkin County. Now one of the state’s most iconic hubs for culture and recreation, Aspen began like many Colorado towns—as a small mining camp, founded by Henry…

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…

Beaver Creek Resort

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…

Berthoud

Berthoud is a semirural town south of Loveland in both Larimer and Weld Counties. It started in the early 1860s as Little Thompson Station, a stagecoach stop near the Little Thompson River about halfway between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver on the…

Boulder

Boulder is Colorado’s eleventh-most populous city, twenty-five miles northwest of Denver, nestled against the foothills of the Front Range. Home of the University of Colorado (CU), the city has a population of 97,385 and is the seat of Boulder County…

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…

Brush

Brush is an agricultural community in Morgan County on the plains of eastern Colorado. It is located just east of Fort Morgan at the convergence of US Highway 34, US Highway 6, and State Highway 71 and is situated along the historic Texas Montana Trail…

Burlington (Boulder County)

Burlington was a small homestead community along St. Vrain Creek, near present-day Longmont. Founded in 1860 by prospector Alonzo N. Allen, Burlington was named after Burlington, Iowa. The settlement grew to a population of about 150 before the Chicago…

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…

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…

Chicago-Colorado Colony

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…

Colorado Springs

Colorado Springs is the second-most populous city in Colorado, with more than 456,000 residents. Located about sixty miles south of Denver at the base of Pikes Peak, it is the county seat of El Paso County and one of the most popular tourist destinations…

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…

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…

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…

Crestone

Perhaps no town in the western United States has taken a more unexpected turn than Crestone, Colorado – the onetime mining and ranching center has become an international hub for Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, and other spiritual practices. Located at the…

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…

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…

Denver

Denver is the capital of Colorado and the twenty-first largest city in the United States, sprawling over six counties and 3,497 square miles of the High Plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. Centered at the confluence of the South Platte River and…

Denver’s Capitol Hill

The Capitol Hill neighborhood in Denver is bounded by Broadway Street, Downing Street, Colfax Avenue, and Seventh Avenue. It contains the Capitol Building and many other landmarks, including the Molly Brown House. The history and development of the…

Denver’s Chinatown

For economic reasons, as well as to protect themselves from an Anglo-American culture that mostly viewed them with contempt, Denver’s Chinese residents established an ethnic enclave in the city around 1870. The neighborhood endured decades of racially…

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…

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…

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…

Fort Collins

Fort Collins, the fourth-most populous city in Colorado, lies along the Cache la Poudre River near the foothills of the northern Front Range. The seat of Larimer County, Fort Collins was founded as an Army camp in 1864 and has since developed into a…

Fort Morgan

Fort Morgan is a city of about 12,000 people along the South Platte River, about seventy miles northeast of Denver. It is part of the high plains region that an early explorer, Major Stephen Long, called the “Great American Desert.” As the center of a…

Front Range

The Front Range is a corridor of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding land stretching 200 miles from the Wyoming border on the north to the Arkansas River on the south. The western border of the Front Range consists of a collection of high mountain ranges…

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…

Glenwood Springs

Glenwood Springs is a mountain resort community 150 miles west of Denver, at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork Rivers on Colorado’s Western Slope. It is the seat of Garfield County and has a population of nearly 10,000. The city is known…

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…

Golden

Now a small pocket city in the suburbs of Denver, Golden was once the most powerful city in the state and the capital of the Colorado Territory. Today, Golden is known for the Coors Brewery and the Colorado School of Mines and as the seat of Jefferson…

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

With a population of nearly 60,000, Grand Junction is the largest city on Colorado’s Western Slope. The city takes its name from its location at the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado (formerly the Grand) Rivers, in the heart of the Grand Valley…

Greeley

Greeley is a growing community of 100,000 people along the Front Range in northeastern Colorado. Founded as an agricultural colony in 1870, the city has an economic, political, and cultural reach that extends far beyond its municipal borders. Greeley is…

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…

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…

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…

Lakewood

Located immediately west of Denver in Jefferson County, the city of Lakewood began as a scattered farming community and was incorporated in 1969 during its post-World War II  population boom. With a 2020 population of 155,984, Lakewood is now the…

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…

LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver)

Officially known as the Union Station neighborhood until The Denver Post’s Dick Kreck first referred to it as LoDo (as in Manhattan’s SoHo) in a 1983 column, Lower Downtown Denver has become a national model of how a decaying core city neighborhood can…

Longmont

Longmont is a city of about 92,000 along the Front Range in eastern Boulder County. Named after the prominent Longs Peak to the west, the city was founded in 1871 by members of the Chicago-Colorado Colony, near the confluence of Left Hand and St. Vrain…

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…

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…

Lowry Neighborhood

Located on the eastern edge of Denver, Lowry is one of the city’s newest neighborhoods but has old roots. The area was first developed in the early 1900s, when it became home to the Agnes C. Phipps Memorial Sanatorium, one of the largest of Colorado’s…

Meeker

About 225 miles west of Denver, at an elevation of 6,400 feet and adjacent to the White River, lies the small mountain community of Meeker. It is known for its ranching and access to hunting and fishing areas, as well as other outdoor recreation hotspots…

Montclair

Situated on the east side of Denver and rising some 330 feet above the State Capitol’s gold dome, the town of Montclair was platted in 1885. The common French place-name means “clear mountain,” and Montclair was so named for its panoramic view of the…

Montrose

The city of Montrose lies in the heart of the Uncompahgre Valley on Colorado’s Western Slope, about sixty miles southeast of Grand Junction and sixty-three miles east of the Utah border. With a population of about 20,000, it is the county seat and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Pueblo

Pueblo is a city of approximately 110,000 people located near the confluence of Fountain Creek and the Arkansas River, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. It is the county seat of Pueblo County, lying just off Interstate 25 about 100 miles…

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…

Sakura Square

Located in the historic heart of Denver’s Japanese community, Sakura Square is bounded by Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets and Larimer and Lawrence Streets in the Lower Downtown district, or LoDo. The square, named for the Japanese word for “cherry…

Salida

Salida is a city of about 6,000 in the Upper Arkansas River valley, surrounded by Colorado’s central Rocky Mountains. It is the county seat of Chaffee County. Salida is named for the Spanish word for “exit,” as it is located near the mouth of a canyon of…

San Luis

The oldest continuously occupied town in Colorado, San Luis sits along Culebra Creek, just west of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the southeast portion of the San Luis Valley. In April 1851, Hispanos from Taos, New Mexico, founded San Luis on the…

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…

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…

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…

Sterling

Sterling is the county seat of Logan County in northeastern Colorado. Founded by homesteaders along the South Platte River in 1881, Sterling quickly developed into a commercial hub on Colorado’s eastern plains. Although it has been through its share of…

Telluride

Telluride is a small town located in the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains. It is the county seat of San Miguel County. Like many other mountain towns, it was founded as a mining center in 1878. Originally, it was named “Columbia,” but in order to…

Victor

Victor, the “City of Mines,” is located in Teller County on the western side of Pikes Peak. Incorporated in 1894, Victor was part of the Cripple Creek District, site of Colorado’s last significant gold mining boom. The city is situated next to Pike…

Walden / North Park

Founded in 1888, Walden is located in the high basin of North Park in Jackson County, at an elevation of 8,099 feet. Considered the “Moose Viewing Capital of Colorado,” Walden has an estimated population of 600. Despite its small population, the town…

Western Slope

“A Fantasy land,” “a mystique,” “a state of mind”—these are only some of the expressions used to describe the Western Slope of Colorado, commonly defined as the roughly one-third of the state that lies west of the Continental Divide. The serpentine…

“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…
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