On the morning of Aug. 15, 1876, Judge Amherst Stone left Golden on a northbound Colorado Central Railroad train to Boulder, where he was expected to formalize a ruling that would put the financially troubled railroad into receivership. He never arrived. Just north of Ralston Creek, near the site that would eventually be known as […]
The shooting deaths of two different gamblers made headlines in the brand-new state of Colorado in early August 1876, though only one would still be the stuff of legend 150 years later. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok was killed in the boomtown of Deadwood in the Dakota Territory on Aug. 2, though it was more […]
Coloradans young and old spent a hot, sunny day in downtown Denver celebrating 150 years of Centennial State history with cake, sing-alongs, art projects, Legos, lowriders and even a square dance routine in the halls of the Capitol. After a pancake breakfast, Gov. Jared Polis, dressed head to toe in a red-white-and-blue cowboy getup, kicked […]
Colorado may have always been destined to attain statehood, but it owes its identity as the Centennial State to the partisan political interests of the Reconstruction-era Republican Party. The timing of Colorado’s admission into the union in 1876, weeks after the celebration of the nation’s centenary and just ahead of that year’s pivotal presidential election, […]
The telegraphic dispatch, dated Aug. 1 and sent from Washington, D.C., appeared in newspapers across Colorado and the nation the following day. “The President, in accordance with the provisions of an act of Congress, approved March 3, 1875, has issued his proclamation declaring and proclaiming the fact that the fundamental conditions imposed by Congress on […]
On Halloween night in 1880, a white mob targeted Chinese residents in Denver after a drunken saloon fight, ransacked their homes and businesses, and killed a Chinese man. The killers were never punished and the city failed to compensate people for the tens of thousands of dollars in damage done during the anti-Chinese riot. The […]
When Colorado attained statehood in 1876, roughly half of the portion of the new Centennial State that lay west of the Continental Divide was still reserved for the Ute people. Grand Junction, Durango, Aspen, Gunnison and Glenwood Springs were among the many Colorado communities that didn’t yet exist. An 1868 treaty between the U.S. government and […]
John Harlow, one of the early white settlers in Mesa County, first planted fruit trees in 1882 at his farm at Rapid Creek, a few miles from what is now Palisade. Those are widely considered the first fruit trees in Grand Valley, and they spearheaded the agricultural tradition of peach-growing in the area. Those trees, […]
The Southern Colorado Agricultural and Industrial Association, after holding multiple fairs in Pueblo County since the 1870s, incorporated as the State Fair Association on Nov. 17, 1886. That established Pueblo as the host of Colorado’s annual state fair, now entering its 140th year of the tradition. Previous official state agricultural and industrial fairs took place […]
Poet Katharine Lee Bates spent the summer of 1893 teaching English at the Colorado Summer School at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, on a leave of absence from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. By that time, she was already a published poet and author of works including the novel “Rose and Thorn” and contributions in newspapers […]
