Early Lakewood

Since Lakewood’s settlement in the 1860s, it has been a community in search of an identity, fluctuating from farm center to factory town, from Denver streetcar suburb to the map’s stopover point between the big city and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Once known for its fruit orchards and dairy and poultry farms, Lakewood in modern times has been home to the western third of the nation’s longest commercial street, Colfax Avenue, and houses more federal agencies than any community outside of Washington, DC. Most of the buildings associated with Lakewood’s agricultural and manufacturing past are gone, but the can-do spirit of the men and women who forged and fashioned the city’s destiny as a microcosm of western American life from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries is recalled in these pages.