Fort Collins, 1865 / Coloradoan library
A drawing depicts Fort Collins in the early 1880s. / Coloradoan library
The course of the Cache la Poudre River determined the location of the city of Fort Collins back when this area was still an unsettled frontier and the country was in the throes of the Civil War.
This line of the Overland Stage and Mail Co. moved into the newly created Colorado Territory in 1862, when raids by Sioux and Northern Cheyenne Indians closed the trail up the North Platte River to Fort Laramie. The new route came up to the South Platte River to Latham, then west following the Cache la Poudre to LaPorte, where it turned north to rejoin the main trail in what is now central Wyoming.
Soldiers of the 9th Regiment, Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, were sent to build a small outpost west of LaPorte in summer 1862.
Camp Collins, named for the popular commander at Fort Laramie, Lt. Col. William O. Collins, served as a base for patrolling and protecting the stage and emigrant trails.
In early June 1864, a flood tore through the little camp, sweeping away most of the military supplies. A patrol was sent downriver to find a better location.
Collins came from Fort Laramie in mid-August to inspect the new site, 5 miles downstream. On Aug. 20, 1864, he issued Special Order Numer One, calling for a "permanent post on the Cache la Poudre River."
Soliders of Collins' own 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry were detailed to build the new post. Our town's namesake visited the site only once more — in mid-September that same year, firmly establishing the location of the future town.
How permanent was permanent? The fort was ready for occupancy in late October 1864. It was ordered abandoned 2 1/2 years later in March 1867. Civilians who had been allowed to settle on the military ground stayed and formed the nucleus of the fledgling town's population. Joe Mason became the town's first storekeeper. Elizabeth Stone had been a cook for the officers and now turned her log home into a hotel. Henry Clay Peterson, the fort's gunsmith, partnered with Stone in the first grist mill in Fort Collins.
The mill, owned by Peterson and Stone, began operating in late 1868, grinding grains of local farmers such as John G. Coy, who had settled in the rich bottomland across the river in 1862. Mason and Sam Gano operated a stageline from Fort Collins to the new town of Cheyenne, with its rail connection to the East and soon, the West Coast.
Judge Alfred Howes raised $1,100 in 1870 to build the first public school in town.
In 1872, the War Department, after searching unsuccessfully for five years for some record of a reservation, asked Congress to open the land to homesteading. Some residents joined others who had come over from Greeley and created a town company, the Larimer County Land Improvement Co.
Part of its membership list reads like a roll call of the streets in the older part of Fort Collins: John C. Mathews, AE. Howes, Jesse M. Sherwood, John C. Remington, Norman H. Meldrum, E.W. Whitcomb, Benjamin T. Whedbee and Mason. The company hired Franklin C. Avery, a young surveyor who helped lay out the town of Greeley in 1870, to plat the area nearest the remnants of the old fort.
Avery created a 21-block square in late November 1872. It included roads and buildings that had grown around the fort and was oriented on a northeast-southwest line and parallel to the river.
In January 1873, Avery was able to do what he was trained to do as a surveyor; lay out the rest of the town on north-south meridians and east-west baselines. He named the east-west streets for trees and bushes, just as he had done three years earlier for Greeley. The idea was to plant trees and bushes of the variety along their namesake streets to create an Eastern environment. But that part of the town plan was never to be due to the climate.
Streets are named
The north-south streets were named for the town's "founding fathers." The exception was College Avenue, which went south past the Agriculture College grounds.
Citizens lobbied the territorial Legislature for the college in 1870, three years before there was officially a town. Larimer County commissioners appointed a five-member Board of Trustees, the equivalent of today's City Council, to run the town.
These men, Whedbee, Peterson, W.C. Stover, George Blake and W.S. Vecilius, met on Feb. 4, 1873. Whedbee was elected town board president, or mayor, and their only real business was to consider extending College Avenue north to the river where the commissioners were proposing to build a bridge. More importantly, the town was officially entity.
Railroad sustains town
It wasn't until 1877 that the town’s survival was guaranteed with the laying of the tracks of the Colorado Central Railroad down Mason Street.
So desperate was the Board of Trustees for rail links to Denver and Cheyenne, that it granted a right-of-way down the center of the street forever. Now Fort Collins would grow. The first spurt occurred during the 1880s, as population grew from 1,356 to 2,011.
Citizens demanded more municipal services, and the city government responded. A combined city hall and fire house was built on Walnut Street in 1882 and a water system followed the next year. Incorporated in fall 1887, the "Fort Collins Light, Heat and Power company" began illuminating the city early the next year.
Brick and stone became the building materials of choice. Franklin and Sarah Avery's elegantly restored home on West Mountain and the imposing McHugh Home and carriage house at Oak and Remington streets showcase the quality of this stone. The homes of the Arthur family at Mulberry and Peterson and William Stover's residence two blocks west are fine examples of Victorian elegance that prompted the late local historian Richard Baker to label this decade the "Elegant Eighties."
The addition of many other homes and businesses capped off by the beautiful red sandstone Miller Block in 1888 brought the ''Elegant Eighties" to a close.
War between wets, drys
Frank Miller's liquor business in an 1891 addition to his building added fuel to an ongoing feud between the town's "wets" and "drys."
There always had been strong anti-liquor sentiment in Fort Collins. The Larimer County Land Improvement Co. had stated it quite strongly in their Circular Number One in late 1872, ''What we do not want is whiskey saloons or gambling halls. There is not a place in the county where liquor is legal or publicly sold as a beverage, neither do we intend that it shall if we can help it."
The "wets" prevailed early on but saloons paid high license fees. By the 1890s, temperance and prohibition forces had gained more strength. A strong prohibition ticket gained control of City Hall. In 1896, the city went dry.
This action wasn’t fully reversed until 1969.
Town grows quickly
Entry into the 20th century brought an agricultural boom to Larimer County. Lamb feeding and sugar-beet growing emerged as the main economic supports by the close of the first decade. The town's population grew from 3,053 in 1900 to 8,210 in 1910. Completion of the sugar factory on East Vine Drive in 1903 and the electric street railway in 1907 hallmarked this growth period.
The Evening Courier, on Dec. 31, 1907, published a detailed article on the rapidly expanding city. It now had: "Three public parks, 2 hospitals, 5 restaurants, 3 foundry and machine shops, a public library containing 5,000 volumes, 3 daily and 4 weekly newspapers, 1 electric and 2 vaude-ville theaters, 10 church edifices, 2 merchant flouring mills with a daily capacity of 800 barrels, municipal water plant with 55 miles of water mains and 115 fire hydrants, 16 miles of public sewers, and 75 miles of stone and concrete sidewalks."
Fort Collins sounded like a place that would attract many more settlers, but, instead, growth stagnated and the town remained a small, sleepy farming community for the next 40 years. Citizens insisted on their public transportation, so, in the spring of 1919, the city went into the trolley business.
A new high school building on the south edge of town stimulated some growth after it was completed in 1925, as did a brief oil and gas boom in the mid-'20s. The Great Depression and World War II went by with little change in the city as agriculture and the "Aggies" College remained its economic strengths.
The town began to grow and diversify after the war. Forney Industries became the first large home-grown manufacturing business with its many different products — farm welders, aircraft, movies, wrought-iron furniture, and even a built-in home vacuum system.
During the '50s, Forney was the largest employer in town. Many physical changes in the city occurred as the town's population reached 15,000 in 1950; then grew to 25,000 by 1960. South College Heights, platted in the early '60s, was the first new large subdivision to be added to the city.
Older homes and churches close to downtown were demolished to make way for new or expanded businesses. Through the '60s, Aqua Tee became the newest local industry and larger light industries such as Woodward Governor saw Fort Collins as an attractive location with a good work force. Growth jumped to 75 percent for each of the three next decades as the city's boundaries expanded quickly, especially to the south and southeast.
Many high-tech industries established themselves in Fort Collins. A preservation ethic emerged by the late 1960s, and several homes and businesses from the "Elegant Eighties" have been landmarked and restored. The Old Town Square project of 1983-84 combined the old and new, bringing a new life to that part of downtown.
Today, the city has grown to an urban center with a population of near 150,000, but it still retains enough of its past to remind people of its pioneer heritage.