Lamar, Colorado

Lamar owes its existence to a piece of railroad skullduggery. In 1886 the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was pushing up the Arkansas River valley, and Kansas businessman I.R. Holmes, partnering with the railroad, wanted the station on their new townsite rather than at the existing Blackwell station on cattleman A.R. Black's ranch, where Black refused to give up the land. The story, told by Prowers County's own historians, is that late on May 22, 1886 a telegram called Black away to Pueblo on 'urgent business,' and while he was gone a work crew jacked the depot off its foundation and hauled it three miles west — with the station agent's family still inside — to the site that became Lamar. The town was named for Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, then U.S. Secretary of the Interior, whose department controlled the public land the railroad and settlers needed.

The land around Lamar had been a crossroads long before the railroad. Up the Arkansas stood the Big Timbers, a famous stretch of old cottonwoods where Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche and other Plains peoples wintered and held councils, and where Santa Fe Trail travelers and army expeditions camped for the shade and water. Prowers County was created in 1889 and named for John Wesley Prowers, an early Arkansas valley rancher, with Lamar as its seat. In 1928 the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated one of their twelve 'Madonna of the Trail' pioneer statues in Lamar's Santa Fe Park, marking the old National Old Trails Road — it still stands downtown, one of only twelve nationwide.

Lamar grew into the trade and farm hub of southeastern Colorado, and it did something unusual for a plains town: it built and kept its own utilities. Lamar Light and Power has supplied the community's electricity since 1920, and in 2004 the municipal utility helped put up wind turbines on the breezy high prairie, tapping the same relentless southeastern-Colorado wind that also drew the large Colorado Green and other commercial wind farms to Prowers County. Today Lamar is the county seat and the largest town for a long way in any direction, sitting where US 50 and US 287/385 cross near the Arkansas — a working agricultural city of cattle, feed, and irrigated crops on the wide-open eastern plains.

Lamar today is the unpretentious, hard-working hub of the southeastern plains — the place where ranchers, farmers, and travelers on US 50 stop for supplies, a meal, and a full tank. Downtown you can still stand in front of the 1928 Madonna of the Trail statue in Santa Fe Park, and the Big Timbers Museum keeps the Prowers County Historical Society's collections, from Santa Fe Trail relics to the story of the notorious 1928 Fleagle Gang bank robbery. The land is big-sky and wide open, with the Arkansas River and its cottonwoods threading the edge of town and endless prairie in every direction. It's a genuine, friendly small city where the wind farms turning on the horizon share the skyline with grain elevators, and where a slower, neighborly pace is the whole point.