94 Fun Facts About Fort Collins

Fort Collins was founded in 1864 as what kind of settlement?

A U.S. Army outpost went up in 1864 to guard travellers on the Overland Trail; the Army closed it in 1867, and settlers platted a town on the site.

Lieutenant Colonel William O. Collins commanded which Army post in present-day Wyoming when he approved the fort named for him?

Fort Laramie was his headquarters with the 11th Ohio Cavalry; a fort was renamed for his son Caspar, killed in battle in 1865, and the city of Casper, Wyoming, keeps the name, misspelled.

What destroyed the original Camp Collins near Laporte in June 1864, forcing the Army to pick a new site?

A flood on the Cache la Poudre swept the camp away in June 1864, so the Army rebuilt downstream on what is now the edge of Fort Collins's Old Town.

Fort Collins is the seat of which Colorado county?

Larimer County, created in 1861, was named for General William Larimer; its seat sat at Laporte until townspeople won it for Fort Collins.

Fort Collins pioneer 'Auntie' Stone came to the fort in 1864 to run what?

Officers' mess duty brought Auntie Stone to the fort; when the post closed in 1867 she opened her two-story cabin to the public as a hotel, and the settlement's first school met there.

With about 170,000 residents at the 2020 census, Fort Collins shares its metropolitan area with which smaller city to the south?

Loveland is named for William A.H. Loveland, whose Colorado Central Railroad became the first line to reach Fort Collins in 1877.

Fort Collins sits nearly a mile high at the foot of which mountain range?

Front Range peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park give rise to the Cache la Poudre, which leaves the foothills just above town and waters farms and cities across northern Colorado.

Fort Collins's river is said to be named for a cache of what, buried by French trappers?

Gunpowder, in the best-known telling: French trappers caught by a snowstorm buried their supply on the riverbank, and the name Cache la Poudre means roughly 'hide the powder.'

The Poudre River empties into which larger river a few miles east of Greeley?

South Platte is where the Poudre ends, but an 1874 fight between Greeley and Fort Collins farmers over its dwindling flow pushed Colorado to write first-in-time water rights into its constitution.

In October 1986, 76 miles of the Cache la Poudre received which federal designation?

Wild and Scenic River status, the first granted in Colorado, keeps the upper Poudre free-flowing: it effectively blocks the licensing of new dams on the protected stretch.

How do Fort Collins locals pronounce "Poudre", the name of their river?

POO-der is how locals say it: the spelling is still French, but the sound is plain English, and the first word of Cache la Poudre comes out as 'cash.'

Horsetooth Reservoir was completed in 1949 as part of which federal water project?

Horsetooth Reservoir stores Colorado-Big Thompson Project water carried east under the Continental Divide through the Alva B. Adams Tunnel, and it is held back by four earthen dams.

Filling Horsetooth Reservoir in the late 1940s submerged what was left of which sandstone-quarry town?

Stout took its name in 1882 from William Stout, who ran the quarries that shipped building stone to Denver; by 1949 few people remained, and the reservoir covered the townsite.

Which landmark appears in the official seal of the City of Fort Collins?

Horsetooth Rock, the tooth-shaped outcrop on the ridge west of the city, is the landmark on the Fort Collins seal, and both the reservoir at its foot and a main cross-town road took its name.

CSU was chartered in 1870 under what name?

Colorado Agricultural College taught no one for nine years: chartered in 1870, it welcomed its first students only in 1879, in the newly built Old Main.

A feasibility study led by CSU engineer Maurice Albertson helped shape which federal volunteer program?

Peace Corps planning drew on the study: in 1960 Congress funded research into a 'Point Four Youth Corps', and Albertson's Colorado State team won the contract and reported that the idea would work.

Before the mascot was renamed CAM at a basketball halftime, what was CSU's first live ram called?

Buck, the first woolly ram, made his debut at a basketball game against Denver in January 1946; the mascot later became CAM, short for Colorado A&M, the school's name at the time.

Which school was blamed for the 1918 poisoning of Peanuts, an early CSU bulldog mascot?

CU Boulder was blamed, though nothing was ever proven, after Peanuts was found poisoned in April 1918; the bulldog had come to town in 1912 and had the run of the campus.

CSU's hillside letter above the old Hughes Stadium site honors teams once known as what?

Aggies was the old nickname, a nod to the school's farming roots; students painted the giant white 'A' on the hogback in the 1920s, and later classes have kept it whitewashed.

What are Colorado State University's official school colors?

Green and gold replaced the first pairing: before an 1893 football game, players and fans bought orange and green ribbons at a dry goods store, and orange survives in the school palette as a nod to that start.

Autism advocate Temple Grandin joined the CSU faculty in 1990 in which field?

Animal science is Temple Grandin's field: she showed that cattle balk at shadows and other visual distractions, and she says half of U.S. cattle now move through facilities she designed.

Six-time Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken, one of CSU's most famous athletes, competed in which sport?

Swimming began as medicine for Amy Van Dyken: doctors sent the asthmatic child to the pool to build up her lungs, and in 1996 she became the first American woman to win four golds at one Games.

The Oval at the heart of the CSU campus is lined with rows of which tree?

American elm rows have framed the Oval since it was laid out in 1909, a sight that became rare elsewhere after Dutch elm disease killed most of the country's mature elms.

Which Fort Collins-born Disney artist contributed ideas for Main Street, U.S.A.?

Harper Goff had photographs taken of his hometown and showed them to Walt Disney; by his account, Disneyland's City Hall and bank were copied from Fort Collins buildings.

Along with Fort Collins, which Missouri town inspired the look of Disney's Main Street, U.S.A.?

Marceline is where Walt Disney spent several years of his childhood; the Fort Collins link came from a park designer who grew up there and showed Disney photographs of its downtown.

Which sugar-beet workers first settled Buckingham and Andersonville in Fort Collins?

Germans from Russia, whose ancestors had settled along the Volga in the 1760s, were prized as experienced beet hands, so the sugar company brought in whole families to work the fields.

Which local ban did Fort Collins lift only in 1969, decades after most American cities?

Alcohol sales stayed illegal in Fort Collins until 1969; twenty years later the once-dry town got its first craft breweries, and beer is now one of its best-known industries.

Kim Jordan co-founded New Belgium Brewing in 1991 with which partner?

Jeff Lebesch bicycled from brewery to brewery in Belgium, then came home and started brewing Belgian-style beer in his Fort Collins basement, which the company soon outgrew.

In 1999 New Belgium became the first U.S. brewery powered entirely by what?

In 1999 New Belgium's employees voted to buy all of the brewery's electricity from wind power, giving up part of their bonuses to cover the premium and making it the first wind-powered U.S. brewery.

In 2019 New Belgium was bought by Lion, the Australian subsidiary of which Japanese beverage group?

Kirin owns Lion, the buyer, and the tie soon ran both ways: in 2024 Kirin said New Belgium would take over brewing Kirin's own beer for the U.S. market.

Before New Belgium reformulated Fat Tire in January 2023, what style of beer was it?

Amber ale was Fat Tire's style for three decades: the recipe grew out of a co-founder's bicycle trip between Belgian breweries, and the 2023 rework made it lighter and crisper.

Odell Brewing opened in 1989 inside a converted 1915 building that had been what?

A grain elevator from 1915 housed the first brewhouse after Doug Odell's sister Corkie, who lived in Fort Collins, sold him and his wife on a college town with no craft breweries.

Which national brewer opened a Fort Collins plant in 1988?

Anheuser-Busch beat the craft brewers to town: its brewery opened beside Interstate 25 in 1988, and CooperSmith's brewpub and Odell both followed in 1989.

The Fort Collins Municipal Railway ran the last regularly scheduled streetcars of which type in the United States?

Birney safety cars made up the whole fleet after the city took over the failing private trolley line in 1919, starting with four bought new from the American Car Company.

Along which Fort Collins street does the restored heritage streetcar run on summer weekends?

Mountain Avenue got its rails back thanks to volunteers: they restored Car 21, which had sat outdoors on display for about a quarter century, and relaid track for its return in the 1980s.

Fort Collins's MAX bus rapid transit line, opened in 2014, runs along which corridor?

Mason Corridor buses run partly on a guideway of their own parallel to College Avenue, with priority at some signals, which is what makes the line rapid.

Which magazine named Fort Collins the best place to live in the United States in 2006?

Money put Fort Collins first on its 2006 Best Places to Live list, ahead of Naperville, Illinois; that year the magazine went looking for small cities with good jobs, low crime and plenty of open space.

Which Bicycle Friendly Community level did Fort Collins earn in 2013, when only three other US cities held it?

The League of American Bicyclists rated Fort Collins Platinum in 2013, a level then held only by Boulder, Davis and Portland; PeopleForBikes ranked it the top U.S. cycling city in 2018.

Which Gone with the Wind actress lived in Fort Collins as a girl?

Hattie McDaniel was a small girl when her family, headed by a Civil War veteran, lived in Fort Collins; segregation kept her from the film's Atlanta premiere, yet she won the Oscar for it.

Which future Supreme Court justice, nicknamed "Whizzer", was born in Fort Collins in 1917?

Byron White was a football star first: the 1937 Heisman runner-up for Colorado led the NFL in rushing as a rookie, then sat on the Supreme Court from 1962 to 1993.

During the 2009 "balloon boy" hoax in Fort Collins, where was six-year-old Falcon Heene eventually found?

In the family attic, in a box, the whole time: on live television that night Falcon blurted out 'we did this for the show', and his father later pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant.

Which agency operates time-signal station WWV near Fort Collins?

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, runs WWV from a site north of Fort Collins that it shares with WWVB, the 60 kHz station that sets radio-controlled clocks.

Which Fort Collins manufacturer began in 1870 with a governor for waterwheels?

Woodward dates to Amos Woodward's 1870 waterwheel governor; the company moved on to hydro turbines and now builds controls for aircraft engines.

The Lindenmeier site north of Fort Collins is one of the largest known campsites of which prehistoric culture?

Folsom points turned up here in 1924, when the local Coffin family noticed fluted points unlike ordinary arrowheads; they pressed scholars for a decade until the Smithsonian came to dig.

The 2020 Cameron Peak Fire west of Fort Collins set what Colorado record?

Largest wildfire in state history: it burned more than 208,000 acres and took the record from the Pine Gulch Fire, which had set it only seven weeks earlier.

By the early 1900s, sugar-beet by-products made Fort Collins the world capital of what?

Lamb feeding took off because beet tops and factory pulp made cheap, rich fodder; a local historian judged that the town's prosperity for the next forty years hung on beets and lambs.

Which Fort Collins creek overflowed in the deadly July 1997 storm?

Spring Creek rose after the heaviest rain ever recorded in a Colorado urban area, as much as 14.5 inches in about thirty hours; five people died, and the city set up a new early-warning system.

Which philanthropist gave $12,500 for Fort Collins's first purpose-built public library, completed in 1904?

Andrew Carnegie first promised $10,000 on condition that the city provide a site and $1,000 a year for upkeep; when funds ran short, a second letter won another $2,500.

Fort Collins ranked fourth in Colorado at the 2020 census, behind Denver, Colorado Springs and which city?

Aurora began in 1891 as Fletcher, a four-square-mile real-estate venture named for a Denver developer; the silver crash of 1893 sank its hopes, and it took its present name in 1907.

Which state capital sits closer to Fort Collins than Denver does?

Cheyenne is about 45 miles up Interstate 25, against roughly 60 to Denver, and in 1924 Fort Collins bought two second-hand streetcars from the Wyoming capital.

What triggered Fort Collins' first population boom in 1872?

The Agricultural Colony of 1872 brought hundreds of settlers, who took lots south of the original townsite; friction between newcomers and old settlers shaped politics in the town incorporated in 1873.

Which company started the Fort Collins trolley service in 1907?

The Denver and Interurban Railroad, a Colorado and Southern subsidiary, opened the Fort Collins streetcar line on December 29, 1907; the city bought it out after the company gave up local service in 1918.

Each year, Colorado State University forecasters issue a seasonal prediction of what?

Atlantic hurricanes are forecast from a landlocked campus at the foot of the Rockies: William Gray pioneered the seasonal outlooks at Colorado State, and his last student, Philip Klotzbach, leads them now.

Which Fort Collins venue is home to the city's symphony orchestra?

Lincoln Center opened in 1978 on the site of the old Lincoln Junior High School after voters approved a tax to build it, and the Fort Collins Symphony plays in its Performance Hall.

Fort Collins-born child actor Jake Lloyd played which character in the 1999 film Star Wars: The Phantom Menace?

Anakin Skywalker took George Lucas up to two years to cast, with some 3,000 other children trying out for the part. Lloyd had already played the son in Jingle All the Way.

Which actor, born in Fort Collins in 1977, broke out as the awkward title teen in Napoleon Dynamite?

Jon Heder won MTV Movie Awards for both Breakthrough Male Performance and Best Musical Performance for the role in 2005. He later skated opposite Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory.

Which animated series named a 2016 episode after Fort Collins, with every resident's internet history made public?

South Park has Danish activists switch on a troll-tracing website that publishes the browsing of the whole city, which then collapses into chaos.

Colorado State's basketball arena is nicknamed for which literary creature, thanks to its humped roof?

Moby Dick stuck after a student newspaper article said the hump-roofed gym looked like a beached whale. Its official name is the Colorado State Auditorium-Gymnasium.

Bison released in 2015 at Fort Collins's Soapstone Prairie carry the prized genetics of which national park's herd?

Yellowstone supplied the bloodline, and ten bison were released into a 1,000-acre fenced pasture as a starter herd for restoring heritage bison elsewhere.

Susan Butcher, who studied at Colorado State before moving to Alaska, won which sled dog race four times?

Iditarod wins made her the first musher to take four titles in five years, starting in 1986. A year earlier a moose had killed two of her dogs in the middle of the race.

Glenn Morris, a Colorado State alumnus who won the 1936 Olympic decathlon, went on to play which screen hero?

Tarzan was his part in the 1938 film Tarzan's Revenge, made after he broke his own decathlon world record at the Berlin Games. He left the movie business that same year.

Which maker of dental irrigators and pulsating shower heads has its headquarters in Fort Collins?

Waterpik began in 1962 as Aqua Tec Corporation, built around the invention of the oral irrigator. It later carried the pulsing idea over to showerheads.

Fort Collins is the headquarters of a national forest renamed in 1932 to honor which US president?

Theodore Roosevelt was honored only after two earlier names: the forest began in 1902 inside the Medicine Bow reserve and was the Colorado National Forest from 1910.

Since 2014, Old Town Fort Collins has hosted an annual costumed parade for hundreds of which short-legged breed?

Corgis first marched from Library Park around Old Town Square after one owner's online invitation went viral. She modelled the event on the Tour de Fat.

Which feature, expected of any frontier fort, was missing from the 1860s cavalry camp that grew into Fort Collins?

Walls were never built around the camp, and it lasted only three years before being decommissioned in 1867. Settlers moved in beside the site, which now adjoins Old Town.

The Fort Collins parents behind the 2009 runaway balloon hoax had twice appeared on which reality TV series?

Wife Swap featured the Heenes twice, the second time as a fan-favorite pick for the show's 100th episode. On it the father talked of launching home-made flying saucers into storms.

Thomas Sutherland, who taught at Colorado State for 26 years, was held hostage for over six years in which country?

Lebanon was where he was serving as a university dean when gunmen seized him near his Beirut home in 1985. He was freed in 1991 after 2,353 days in captivity.

Which Colorado State scoring leader later became the first woman to serve as acting head coach in an NBA game?

Becky Hammon went undrafted despite being a three-time All-American for the Rams, then played 16 WNBA seasons before the San Antonio Spurs hired her as an assistant in 2014.

Which actor, who played father James Evans on the sitcom Good Times, was a Colorado State football player?

John Amos graduated in sociology, signed with the Denver Broncos as a free agent in 1964, and went on to play the adult Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots.

Which Saturday Night Live comedian transferred to Colorado State to follow her college basketball coach?

Leslie Jones arrived in 1986 from Chapman University and changed majors several times, trying accounting and computing before she settled on communications.

The 2012 High Park Fire west of Fort Collins, which destroyed more than 259 homes, was started by what?

A lightning strike hit a tree that investigators later located, in country so hard to reach that the blaze went on to burn more than 87,000 acres.

Which endangered prairie-dog hunter was reintroduced at Fort Collins's Soapstone Prairie Natural Area in 2014?

The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, before a few survivors turned up in Wyoming two years later.

Colorado State and Wyoming football teams play for which trophy, a relic of an instructor's Vietnam service?

The Bronze Boot was worn in Vietnam by Captain Dan Romero, an ROTC instructor at the Fort Collins school. Cadets from both campuses relay the game ball to the state line.

Which federal health agency bases its Division of Vector-Borne Diseases in Fort Collins, far from its main campus?

The CDC runs the division from Colorado State University's Foothills Campus, where its scientists track illnesses carried by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas.

Franklin Avery, who surveyed Fort Collins in 1873, is credited with giving the town which lasting feature?

Unusually wide streets came from Avery taking advantage of the open spaces around the young town. He later founded the First National Bank, and his 1879 house is open for tours.

Camp Collins, the forerunner of Fort Collins, was set up in 1862 to guard stagecoaches and emigrants on which route?

The Overland Trail carried the mail after the route was relocated through the region, and its local stretch was known as the Denver Road.

William O. Collins, the cavalry officer Fort Collins is named for, was a lawyer and state senator from which state?

Ohio volunteers followed the 52-year-old Collins west in 1862 to guard the mail routes, far from the Civil War's battlefields.

Friday, an interpreter and peacemaker whose band lived along the Cache la Poudre, led people of which nation?

The Arapaho leader, schooled in St. Louis as a boy, befriended settlers and found farm and ranch jobs for his people after their hunting grounds were lost.

Which Colorado State landmark, the campus cornerstone since 1878, was destroyed by arson during a 1970 protest?

Old Main burned on the second day of a campus walkout over the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths at Kent State. It had been the school's first main building.

Astronaut Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, a Fort Collins High School graduate, held which job when NASA selected her?

A teacher at a high school in Vancouver, Washington, she joined NASA as an educator mission specialist and flew to the space station aboard Discovery in 2010.

Bill Stevenson, who runs Fort Collins's Blasting Room studio, is the drummer of which California punk band?

Descendents albums have been recorded at the studio since 1996. Stevenson's other band, All, founded it after moving to the city from Missouri in 1994.

Odell Brewing's flagship beer, 90 Shilling, takes its name from an old method of taxing beer in which country?

Scotland's old shilling system priced ales by strength and quality, and Odell says only the best were taxed at 90 shillings. Doug Odell spent ten years refining his recipes before opening the brewery.

In a legend told about Horsetooth Mountain, the notched summit is the heart of what slain creature?

A giant who drove people from the valley was struck through the heart with a tomahawk as he slept, the story goes, and his body turned to stone.

Which 14,000-foot summit, named for the leader of an 1820 expedition, is visible southwest of Fort Collins?

Longs Peak honors Major Stephen Long, whose expedition sighted the mountain in June 1820 but never climbed it. It also appears on the Colorado state quarter.

The Cache la Poudre River, which flows through Fort Collins, rises at Poudre Lake inside which national park?

Rocky Mountain National Park holds the headwaters, and the river drops more than 6,000 feet on its way to its mouth, which is why it flows so swiftly.

In 2016 Fort Collins's New Belgium Brewing opened its second brewery in which North Carolina city?

Asheville came first and a Denver site followed in 2018; by then the brewery's beers were sold in all 50 states.

A federal laboratory founded in Fort Collins in 1958 keeps the backup copy of the United States' collection of what?

Crop seeds are banked there so that breeders can always draw on a broad genetic pool. The lab opened as the National Seed Storage Laboratory.

The Silver Grill Cafe, serving breakfast in Old Town Fort Collins since 1933, is famous for which plate-sized pastry?

Cinnamon rolls the size of a plate are the cafe's signature, and it bills itself as the oldest restaurant in Northern Colorado.

Which coach, whose name is on the field at Colorado State's Canvas Stadium, won six conference titles with the Rams?

Sonny Lubick took over in 1993, was Sports Illustrated's national coach of the year a season later, and led the Rams to nine bowl games.

Which Colorado State pass rusher went on to win Super Bowls with both the Broncos and the Buccaneers?

Shaquil Barrett was the Mountain West's defensive player of the year in 2013 yet went undrafted. Six years later he led the NFL in sacks.

Which Colorado State tight end won the 2021 Mackey Award as the best in college football at his position?

Trey McBride was also a unanimous All-American that year. At his high school he set career records for basketball scoring and for baseball home runs.

Virginia Dale, a stagecoach station northwest of Fort Collins, was established in 1862 by which notorious gunfighter?

Jack Slade had earlier breakfasted with Mark Twain, who wrote about the meeting in Roughing It. Slade probably named the station after the woman he married.

Colorado State's on-campus football stadium, opened in 2017, carries the name of which kind of business?

A credit union bought the naming rights in 2018 while it was changing its own name, so the stadium's title stayed under wraps until Canvas was unveiled that June.

Which interstate highway runs down the eastern side of Fort Collins on its way south to Denver and Pueblo?

I-25 reaches the city limits just below Harmony Road and serves the university from exits 268 and 269.