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.