Larimer County was created in 1861, and was named after General
William Larimer. Unlike that of much of Colorado, which was founded on the
mining of
gold and
silver, the settlement of Larimer County was based almost entirely on
agriculture, an industry that few thought possible in the region during the initial days of the
Colorado Gold Rush. The mining boom almost entirely passed the county by. It would take the introduction of
irrigation to the region in the 1860s to bring the first widespread settlement to the area.
Early history , from a June 7, 1859, sketch At the time of the arrival of Europeans in the early 19th century, the present-day county was occupied by
Native Americans, with the
Utes occupying the mountainous areas and the
Cheyenne and
Arapaho living on the
piedmont areas along the base of the foothills.
French fur trappers infiltrated the area in the early decades of the 19th century, soon after the area became part of the United States with the
Louisiana Purchase and was organized as part of the
Missouri Territory. In 1828
William H. Ashley ascended the
Cache la Poudre River on his way to the
Green River in present-day
Utah. The river itself received its name in the middle 1830s from an obscure incident in which French-speaking trappers hid
gunpowder along its banks, somewhere near present-day
Laporte or
Bellvue. In 1848 a group of
Cherokee crossed through the county following the North Fork of the Poudre to the
Laramie Plains on their way to
California along a route that became known as the
Cherokee Trail. The area of county was officially opened to white settlement following negotiations with the Cheyenne and Arapaho in the 1858
Treaty of Fort Laramie, by which time the area was part of the
Nebraska Territory. The first U.S. settlers arrived that same year in a party led by
Antoine Janis from
Fort Laramie. Janis, who had visited the area near Bellvue in 1844 and proclaimed it "the most beautiful place on earth", returned to file his official claim and helped found the first U.S. settlement in present-day Colorado, called Colona, just west of Laporte. Nearly simultaneously,
Mariano Medina established
Fort Namaqua along the
Big Thompson River just west of present-day
Loveland. The first irrigation canals were established along the Poudre in the 1860s. In 1862, the settlement established by Janis became a
stagecoach stop along the
Overland Stage Route which was established because of threats of attacks from Native Americans on the northern trails in Wyoming. In 1861, Laporte was designated as the first county seat after the organization of the
Colorado Territory. In 1862, the
United States Army established an outpost near Laporte that was designated as
Camp Collins. A devastating flood in June 1864 wiped out the outpost, forcing the Army to seek a better location. At the urging of
Joseph Mason, who had settled along the Poudre in 1860, the Army relocated its post downstream adjacent to Mason's land along the Overland stage route. The site of the new post became the nucleus of the town of
Fort Collins, incorporated in 1873 after the withdrawal of the Army. By that time, Mason and others had convinced the Colorado Territorial Legislature to designate the new town as the county seat. In 1870, the legislature designated Fort Collins as the location of the state agricultural college (later
Colorado State University), although the institution would exist only on paper for another 9 years while local residents sought money to construct the first campus buildings. In 1873,
Robert A. Cameron and other members of the
Greeley Colony established the
Fort Collins Agricultural Colony, which greatly expanded the
grid plan and population of Fort Collins.
Railroads One of the primary goals of the early citizens of the county was the courting of
railroads. County residents were disappointed when the
Denver Pacific Railroad bypassed the county in 1870 in favor of
Greeley. The first railroad finally arrived in the county in 1877 when the
Colorado Central Railroad extended a line north from
Golden via
Longmont to
Cheyenne. The town council of Fort Collins designated
right-of-way through the center of town (and through the campus of the unbuilt college) for the line, creating a contentious issue to this day. Along the new railroad sprung up the new
platted towns of
Loveland and
Berthoud, named respectively after the
president and
chief surveyor of the Colorado Central. Likewise,
Wellington (founded in 1903) was named for a railroad employee. The
Greeley, Salt Lake, and Pacific Railroad arrived three years later as a subsidiary of the
Union Pacific Railroad, with the intention of creating a transcontinental line over
Cameron Pass. Although the line was never extended over the mountains, it opened up the quarrying of stone for the railroad at
Stout, furnishing another industry for the region. The brief attempt at the mining of gold in the region centered at the now
ghost town of
Manhattan in the
Poudre Canyon.
Agriculture The early growth of agriculture, which depended highly on direct river irrigation, experienced a second boom in 1902 with the introduction of the cultivation of
sugar beets, accompanied by the construction of the large processing plant of the
Great Western Sugar Co. in Loveland. In the following decade, the sugar beet industry brought large numbers of
German emigrants from the Russian Empire to the county. The neighborhoods of Fort Collins northeast of the Poudre were constructed largely to house these new families. A significant increase in the agricultural productivity of the region came in the 1930s with the construction of the
Colorado Big Thompson Project following the
Great Depression, sort of a third boom for the agricultural industry around Fort Collins. This project collected and captured
Western Slope water, and carried it over to the
Front Range Colorado counties of
Boulder, Larimer, and
Weld, along with extensive water storage and distribution system, which significantly extended the irrigable growing season and brought substantial additional land under irrigation for the first time. ==Geography==