Alamosa, Colorado

Alamosa was a railroad's creation, and it arrived nearly ready-made. In 1878 the Denver & Rio Grande narrow-gauge line pushed down from La Veta Pass into the San Luis Valley, and the town was platted on the Rio Grande just before the tracks reached it that summer. Rather than build fresh, the railroad and its followers picked up the nearby end-of-track boomtown of Garland City and moved it. Whole finished buildings — the Occidental Hotel, saloons, stores, and homes among them — were loaded onto flatcars and hauled to the new townsite, then set back down and reopened. Local lore holds that a hotelkeeper served his guests breakfast in a building in Garland City and dinner in that very same building in Alamosa the same day. The name comes from the Spanish for the cottonwoods (álamo) lining the river, and the town has anchored valley commerce ever since.

That railroad head start hardened into an identity. For roughly half a century after 1890, Alamosa was the hub of narrow-gauge railroading in America, with the Denver & Rio Grande running repair shops, a shipping yard, and its narrow-gauge operations here, reaching out across southwestern Colorado and into northern New Mexico. Trains carried out the valley's ore, lumber, livestock, and — increasingly — its crops. Around the rail town grew the institutions that still define the place: Alamosa became the county seat when Alamosa County was carved out in 1913, and in 1921 the state legislator (and future governor) Billy Adams won authorization for a teachers' normal school to serve the remote valley. It held its first session in the summer of 1925 and is now Adams State University, still educating the region from the south side of town.