Grand Junction, Colorado

Grand Junction sits where the Gunnison River meets the Colorado, in a broad irrigated valley walled by the red sandstone cliffs of Colorado National Monument to the southwest and the flat-topped bulk of Grand Mesa to the east. The name is a leftover from an older map: the Colorado was called the Grand River until 1921, when Congress formally renamed it, so the "junction" of the Grand and the Gunnison gave the town its name in 1881. Town promoter George A. Crawford founded it that September, right after the Ute people were removed from the valley and the land was opened to settlers. The Denver and Rio Grande railroad arrived the next year, and gravity canals pulled off the river starting in 1882 turned a hot, dry valley into orchard country.

Water and sunshine made fruit the valley's first identity. Peaches, apples, pears, and cherries took hold by the late 1800s, and the corridor running east toward Palisade is still lined with orchards and, more recently, vineyards. Then came uranium: during World War II and the Cold War, Grand Junction became a hub for the ore that fed the Manhattan Project and the bomb program, with the federal government's principal uranium buying office headquartered here, and locals took to calling the area the uranium capital of the world. Fruit and uranium are an odd pair of claims to fame, but together they explain a town that has always run on what comes out of the ground.