Fort Morgan, Colorado

Fort Morgan began as a soldiers' post on the plains. During the Civil War years the Army built a camp along the Overland Trail to guard emigrants and freight moving between Denver and the East, and in 1866 General John Pope renamed the post for Colonel Christopher A. Morgan, a staff officer who had died earlier that year. The fort itself didn't last long, but the site did. When the Union Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroads laid track through here on their way to Denver in 1882, they gave the spot a reason to become a town. Abner S. Baker — a member of the Union Colony that founded Greeley — platted the town of Fort Morgan on May 1, 1884, the depot followed, and in 1889 the growing railroad town was chosen as the seat of the newly formed Morgan County.

What made Fort Morgan was sugar. Town founder Abner Baker and promoter George Warner helped convince the Great Western Sugar Company to build a factory here, and on December 26, 1906 it processed its first load of sugar beets. The plant pulled in farm families and immigrant laborers — including workers from Mexico from the 1920s — and anchored an irrigated-farming economy along the South Platte that still grows beets, beans, corn, and alfalfa. Of the more than twenty beet-sugar factories built across Colorado in the industry's heyday, Fort Morgan's has proven the most durable: it is the only one still operating in the state. It was into this beet-country town that a young Glenn Miller's family moved in 1918, and he grew up here before leaving for the University of Colorado in 1923.