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

Nuestras Historias maps Latino and Chicano Denver through places

Nuestras Historias mapped Denver places tied to Mexican American, Chicano, and Latino life, drawing on oral histories and community research.

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History and culture

Parker grew around the 20 Mile House way station

Parker grew up around the 20 Mile House, a Cherokee Trail way station that gained a blacksmith, store, and post office.

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History and culture

Pike's Stockade marks where a U.S. expedition camped on the Conejos River

Near the Conejos River in Conejos County, Pike's Stockade is a reconstruction of the 1807 log fort built by the Zebulon Pike expedition, a National Historic Landmark managed by History Colorado.

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History and culture

Pikes Peak carried older names long before it was on a map

The mountain that anchors El Paso County was known to the Ute and other tribes by its own names for generations before Zebulon Pike's 1806 sighting.

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History and culture

South Table Mountain has a WPA amphitheater story

Depression-era crews built the Colorado Amphitheater for Camp George West on South Table Mountain — but the ruins sit on closed federal land.

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History and culture

The Ludlow site north of Trinidad tells a powerful chapter of Colorado labor history

Las Animas County was a center of the Colorado coalfield strikes, and the Ludlow site, where lives were lost in 1914, is a national historic landmark worth visiting thoughtfully.

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History and culture

The Old North End keeps Colorado Springs' early home styles visible

North of downtown Colorado Springs, the Old North End keeps a walkable run of late-1800s and early-1900s homes intact.

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History and culture

The Royal Gorge is narrow enough that two railroads once fought over it

The deep, tight Royal Gorge canyon on the Arkansas River had room for only one rail line, and the fight over that route is a real part of Fremont County's history.

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History and culture

University Park began as a university-minded suburb on the plains

University Park began in 1886 as a Methodist-affiliated community built around the University of Denver's Hilltop campus southeast of the city.

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History and culture

We Are the Land connects Native Denver history to real places

We Are the Land uses Native oral histories and Tribal convenings to tie Denver's living memory to the physical places preservation tools cover.

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History and culture

Weld County's seal names its old identity in pictures

Weld County's official seal uses wheat, a sugar beet, a cow, an oil lamp, and a cog to point at agriculture, education, and industry.

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History and culture

A sod house keeps Wheat Ridge's pioneer layer in view

A three-room sod house believed to date from as early as 1864 still stands on its original site in Wheat Ridge, under the suburb.

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History and culture

Aurora was first called Fletcher

The city of Aurora started in 1891 as the town of Fletcher, named for a developer, and voters renamed it Aurora years later in the early 1900s.

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History and culture

Aurora's historic-sites program treats preservation as a city job

Aurora runs preservation as a city system — a Historic Preservation Commission that protects and promotes its archaeological and historic sites.

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History and culture

Big Timbers and Bent's New Fort: history near Lamar

The Arkansas River near Lamar was once a cottonwood grove called Big Timbers, the site of Bent's New Fort and a meeting ground rich with deep history.

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History and culture

Black Canyon went from monument to national park

Black Canyon of the Gunnison was first protected as a national monument in 1933 and became a national park in 1999. The park named for the Gunnison River sits in neighboring Montrose County.

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History and culture

Blair-Caldwell makes Five Points a research stop, not just a memory

Blair-Caldwell in Five Points combines a branch library, archives, and museum focused on African American life in Colorado and the West.

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History and culture

Boulder County's mountain towns grew up around mining

Many of Boulder County's foothills and mountain communities trace their start to the hard-rock mining era, a story preserved at sites like Nederland and Caribou.

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History and culture

Brighton City Museum keeps the local paper trail close to home

Brighton City Museum holds documents, photos, newspapers, maps, and diaries of Adams County history, open for research by appointment.

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History and culture

Bromley Farm in Brighton: a Japanese American family's farm you can walk

A preserved Brighton farm carries two stories at once, and a fall festival lets families walk the same ground its Japanese American owners worked for sixty years.

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History and culture

Centennial Center Park builds history into a newer civic space

A newer city without an old town square uses Center Park's plaza and amphitheater to carry civic identity tied to the Cherry Creek Basin.

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History and culture

Central City and Black Hawk grew out of an 1859 gold strike

Gilpin County's main towns trace back to an 1859 gold discovery in Gregory Gulch, one of the events that pulled prospectors into the Colorado mountains.

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History and culture

Commerce City's Conter center keeps city history in one public place

Commerce City's Conter Heritage & Cultural Center holds exhibits, archives, and local-history materials in one public place.

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History and culture

Commerce City's history page starts before the industrial map

Commerce City's story runs from Indigenous homelands through prairie settlement, farming, and industry to the city on Denver's north side.

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