Sterling, Colorado

Sterling grew up where the South Platte River bends across Colorado's northeastern plains, on ground that had long been travelled: the Overland Trail, a heavily used route tied to the emigrant road west, ran the south bank of the Platte through here in the 1860s. The town itself dates to 1881. In 1880 a local homesteader, Minos C. King, offered Union Pacific officials a right-of-way if the railroad would build in the area, and when the line came through the townsite was platted in September 1881. The railroad's surveyor, David Leavitt, a native of Sterling, Illinois, is credited with the name. The place took hold fast as a shipping and supply point for the surrounding homesteads. Sterling incorporated in December 1884, and when the state legislature carved Logan County out of Weld County on February 25, 1887, Sterling was named the county seat.

What made Sterling was farming, and above all sugar. Sugar beets were first grown commercially in Logan County around 1890, and a beet-processing factory built at Sterling in 1905 — bought the next year by the Great Western Sugar Company — became an engine of the local economy for some eighty years, until it closed in 1985. The beet fields pulled in labor and money and left Sterling with a solid brick downtown; the Downtown Sterling Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, takes in 88 resources across roughly eight blocks, 54 of them contributing buildings, many of them early-twentieth-century brick storefronts. Alongside the sugar came cattle, wheat, corn, alfalfa, and beans, and in the mid-20th century Northeastern Junior College put a two-year campus in town — still one of the area's largest employers and a steady current of students on the plains.

Two very different things anchor modern Sterling. In 1999 the state opened the Sterling Correctional Facility just outside town, the largest prison in the Colorado Department of Corrections system, which made the state a major local employer. And there are the trees. After a hard freeze in 1982 killed many of Sterling's mature cottonwoods, artist Bradford Rhea began carving the dying trunks into sculptures rather than cutting them down — works like the giraffe-tower 'Skygrazers,' dedicated in the fall of 1984, which became the emblem of what the town now calls itself: the City of Living Trees. A self-guided walk still links the sculptures around town, a small, genuinely strange grace note on an otherwise practical prairie city.

Sterling is the real hub of Colorado's far northeastern corner — the biggest town for a long way in any direction, and the place people from the surrounding farm country come to shop, see a doctor, or send their kids to college. It has a lived-in, unpretentious feel: a walkable brick downtown, the Overland Trail Museum out by the highway telling the pioneer-and-agriculture story, and Northeastern Junior College keeping things lively. The signature draw is the self-guided tour of Bradford Rhea's tree sculptures, scattered within walking distance around town — kids love hunting them down. The South Platte and nearby reservoirs bring fishing, birds, and big-sky sunsets, and the pace is friendly and slow in the way small plains towns are. This is short-grass prairie: enormous skies, room to breathe, and a strong sense that everybody looks out for everybody.