Fort Collins, Colorado

Fort Collins sits where the Cache la Poudre River runs out of the foothills onto the high plains, in Larimer County about 55 miles north of Denver and an hour south of the Wyoming line, at an elevation of roughly 5,000 feet. It started as a military post: soldiers established Camp Collins in 1862 near present-day Laporte, but a flood roared down the Poudre canyon on the night of June 9, 1864, and wrecked it. The Army set aside a new site on higher ground downstream that August, and that second post became the seed of the city. The last soldiers left in 1866, homesteaders moved in, and the town that grew up around the old fort was incorporated on February 3, 1873.

What anchored the place was farming and school. The territorial legislature chartered the Agricultural College of Colorado here in 1870; classes finally began in 1879, and the land-grant school is now Colorado State University, still the town's largest institution and the reason a steady current of students runs through it. For the first half of the 20th century the surrounding fields ran on sugar beets. The Great Western Sugar Company operated a factory in Fort Collins from 1903 to 1954, and during the height of production in the 1930s Larimer and Weld counties together planted well over 100,000 acres of beets, a crop that pulled in German-Russian families who built the Buckingham and Andersonville factory neighborhoods on the north side of town.