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.