This website is the work of many people, many hands, many minds. The tasks of planning, researching, analyzing research, writing, editing, selecting, and ‘webifying’ were (and continue to be) a community project within the Public Lands History Center (PLHC). Members of the PLHC – faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates – swapped sources; shared stories; […]
The cattle industry started in Colorado in the 1860s as a result of growing trade between Texas and Kansas. The ranchers used the open range in Colorado to fatten up herds from Texas before sending them to Kansas. However, in the late 1880s and early 1890s because of declining cattle prices, devastating winters, major cattle […]
Sugar beets played an important role in agriculture in the Cache la Poudre River Basin for the first half of the twentieth century. After Fort Collins and other Front Range towns built beet sugar processing factories in 1902 and 1903, farmers in Larimer County grew more of these sugar-filled roots than any other crop except […]
Horsetooth Reservoir and the C-BT Horsetooth Reservoir is a water storage facility located just west of Fort Collins, Colorado. The reservoir has a capacity of 156,735 acre feet of water, 25 miles of shoreline, and 1,900 surface acres. Horsetooth has more storage capacity than any other reservoir in the Colorado-Big Thompson East Slope distribution system. […]
A collaborative history of Scotts Bluff National Monument, Nebraska http://scottsbluffhistory.com/ This website is part of a project of the PLHC to write a history of Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska. We intend to use this site as a collaborative tool to engage in conversations about our work and to collect stories, photographs, and other […]
Reclaiming an Industrial Waste Site Kingfisher Point Natural Area (146.9 acres) lies east of downtown Fort Collins, and the Cache la Poudre River flows through the northern portion. The Poudre Trail winds its way along the south side of the river and through riparian cottonwood forest for 0.8 miles, and to the south of the […]
While people have used the Cache la Poudre River for fishing, swimming, picnicking, and other leisure activities for more than 150 years, water sport recreation and participation have been on the rise in and around Fort Collins since the 1940s, following the post-war rise in suburban development in the area. The population shifted from agricultural […]
Colorado State University (CSU) has long been involved with the research and experimentation of hydrology. This experimentation has served the local community as well as the national and international one. Colorado State is credited with assisting in projects such as the Grand Coulee Dam, the Hoover Dam, and the Norris Dam. In 1912 President Charles […]
The City of Fort Collins identified the Canal Importation Ponds and Outfall (CIPO) Drainage Improvement Project as a need in the 2002-2003 Stormwater Master Plan Initiative. The CIPO project would repair and modify the Canal Importation Basin, which had sustained significant damage in the Spring Creek flood of 1997. In fact, the highly urbanized area […]
The first agricultural diversions from the Poudre supported crop production in the vicinity, but early town residents quickly recognized the river’s potential for supporting industrial activity as well. Industrial use of water for commercial production began in Fort Collins in 1869 at the Lindell Mill, the first flour mill in the region, which was constructed […]