Colorado Porch

Topic

History and culture

Mining towns and railroads, landmarks and museums, festivals, food, and the local-color stories that make each corner of Colorado make sense.

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Local notes

More history and culture notes

502 sourced notes in this topic

History and culture

The Pioneers Museum lives in the old 1903 county courthouse

The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, the free regional history museum, occupies the historic 1903 El Paso County Courthouse in downtown Colorado Springs.

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History and culture

Why Crestone became a center for retreat and spiritual communities

Starting in the 1980s, a foundation gave land near Crestone to many religious groups, and the area now holds a wide range of retreat centers, monasteries, and temples.

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History and culture

Grand Lake is a lakeside town with a surprising yacht club

The town of Grand Lake sits beside a natural mountain lake and is home to a high-altitude yacht club with roots in the early 1900s.

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History and culture

Sand Canyon held a village with about three times the rooms of Cliff Palace

West of Cortez, the Sand Canyon area in Canyons of the Ancients held a 13th-century village with roughly three times the rooms of Cliff Palace, and hiking there is restricted to marked routes.

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History and culture

Carbondale's Potato Day celebrates the valley's farming roots

Carbondale holds an annual Potato Day, a long-running community event that points back to the area's history of potato farming and ranching.

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History and culture

Raton Pass was once crossed by a private toll road run by 'Uncle Dick' Wootton

The famous crossing south of Trinidad once charged a fee, after frontiersman Richens 'Uncle Dick' Wootton built and operated a toll road over Raton Pass in the 1860s.

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History and culture

Sterling's old Union Pacific depot is a landmark that was moved to save it

Sterling's 1902 Union Pacific Railroad depot is a National Register landmark that the city relocated when passenger service ended, a small window into why the town grew.

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History and culture

Sugar Beet Days and the county fair are the two days Logan County all shows up

Logan County's two big yearly gatherings are Sugar Beet Days on Sterling's courthouse square each September and the Logan County Fair and Rodeo at the fairgrounds each summer.

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History and culture

The 1910 Logan County Courthouse and its Carara paintings reward a downtown stop

Sterling's domed 1910 courthouse is a free, walkable downtown landmark with a restored marble-and-oak rotunda and ten Eugene Carara paintings of northeastern Colorado history.

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History and culture

The county's history lives in an old schoolhouse in Hot Sulphur Springs

Grand County's main history museum sits in a 1920s schoolhouse in Hot Sulphur Springs, alongside an early courthouse and other moved historic buildings.

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History and culture

The Elbert County Historical Society & Museum preserves local history in Kiowa

The Elbert County Historical Society and Museum in Kiowa collects photographs, artifacts, and local histories — a good first stop for research, while official land records stay with the county.

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History and culture

The Garfield County Courthouse is a historic landmark in Glenwood Springs

Garfield County's seat of government is the historic courthouse in downtown Glenwood Springs, a building recognized by History Colorado for its history.

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History and culture

Thornton and Northglenn were built as planned postwar suburbs

Several Adams County cities, including Thornton and Northglenn, grew from planned subdivisions laid out by developers in the postwar boom, not from old town centers.

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History and culture

Why Fruita is dinosaur country

The hills around Fruita produced important early dinosaur finds, a legacy you can trace at a named public site and a local museum.

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History and culture

Dolores grew up around a railroad, and its oldest hotel still shows it

Dolores took shape as a stop on the Rio Grande Southern Railroad, and the town's oldest building, the Southern Hotel, was named for that line.

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History and culture

City Park is old, big, and holds two major institutions

City Park is one of Denver's oldest large parks, laid out in the 1880s, and it surrounds both the Denver Zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

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History and culture

Civic Center was Denver's City Beautiful centerpiece

Civic Center Park between the Capitol and the City and County Building was built in the early 1900s as Denver's grand public space and is now a National Historic Landmark.

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History and culture

Durango's East 3rd Avenue is a street of historic homes

East 3rd Avenue in Durango is a tree-lined street of older homes long recognized for its historic character; check with the city and History Colorado before changing a property there.

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History and culture

Florissant was a ranching settlement before it was a fossil park

The Florissant valley was settled by ranchers and homesteaders in the 1870s, and the restored Hornbek Homestead inside the national monument preserves that story.

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History and culture

Larimer Square survived because someone fought to save it

Larimer Square holds Denver's oldest commercial block, saved from urban-renewal demolition in the 1960s and now a protected historic district.

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History and culture

Loveland's Valentine remailing program is a real, long-running tradition

Each February, Loveland runs a Valentine re-mailing program through the post office and chamber of commerce, hand-stamping cards from around the world with a Loveland postmark.

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History and culture

Manassa keeps the birthplace cabin of boxer Jack Dempsey

The town of Manassa in Conejos County is the birthplace of heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, the 'Manassa Mauler,' and keeps a small museum tied to his early life.

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History and culture

Montrose's old railroad depot is now the county history museum

The Montrose County Historical Museum is housed in the historic Denver & Rio Grande depot in Montrose, a Mission Revival building on the National Register that tells the valley's settlement and railroad story.

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History and culture

Paonia is named for the peony, with a vowel lost along the way

The North Fork town of Paonia takes its name from the Latin word for peony, shortened from Paeonia when the post office balked at the extra vowel.

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