Fort Lupton history: a trading fort, a town on the railroad, Tomato Day, the canneries and a rebuilt fort

Fort Lupton is named for a trading post, and most of its history follows the road beside it. The fur trade, the gold rush freighters, the Denver Pacific Railroad and later US 85 all ran up the South Platte past the same spot, and the town grew where traffic turned off for the depot. This is the short version, taken mostly from the City’s own 2003 history, Crossroads in Eden, and the pages of the South Platte Valley Historical Society, with the other sources listed at the foot. Where they disagree, both are given.

Lupton’s fort

Lancaster Lupton was a West Point graduate and a lieutenant in the U.S. Dragoons who first came to the South Platte with a military expedition in 1835. The Historical Society says he had resigned his commission by 1836 and was bringing skilled craftsmen and laborers north from Taos to build a trade fort, and that by 1837 and 1838 he was trading with the Arapaho and Cheyenne. The City’s history has his caravan leaving Westport, Missouri, on 15 September 1836. Wikipedia dates the post to 1838 and puts it on Adobe Creek.

It was known at the time as Fort Lancaster. By 1838, the 2003 history says, four posts stood on a twelve-mile stretch of the river: Fort Lupton, Fort Jackson, Fort Vasquez and Fort St. Vrain. Lupton traded eastern goods for beaver pelts and buffalo robes, which went down the Platte by caravan to the Missouri. When silk hats displaced beaver around 1840 and the tribes traded less with white middlemen, the business faded. In 1845 Lupton went south with a Bent and St. Vrain caravan and agreed with William Bent never to reopen the fort; he later went to the California gold fields and died there in 1885. The Society’s pages give the fort’s years of operation as both 1836 to 1844 and 1836 to 1843.

Freighters and a claim club

The gold rush brought the fort back into use. In 1858, Crossroads in Eden records, Andrew Jackson Williams claimed the empty post on his way to Cherry Creek, and in 1859 he and Charles Blake ran a freighting company from it, fattening worn-out cattle from passing wagon trains on the river grass. Henry Springer managed the post and became the first postmaster. On 13 June 1860 settlers met at the fort to form the Platte River Claim Club, to protect land claims made on what was still Cheyenne and Arapaho country under the 1851 Fort Laramie treaty. The City’s history dates the post office to 14 January 1861; Wikipedia says the Fort Lupton, Colorado Territory, post office opened on 18 January 1869.

Farm families followed. The Donelson house now at the historic park was built in the 1860s by Thomas Donelson, who came west with the 1859 gold rush, after a flood in 1864 drove the family from their cabin by the river. The Independence School, the area’s first frame schoolhouse, was built in 1875 and paid for by subscription, the parents covering the building and the teacher’s salary.

A town beside the depot

The Denver Pacific Railroad came through in 1870, linking Denver to the Union Pacific at Cheyenne. It put its station at Hughes, now Brighton, where it owned more land, and gave Fort Lupton only a siding, though by 1874 the town shipped more goods on the line than anywhere but Greeley. The town itself was the work of William Grant Winbourn, whom the 2003 history calls the father of modern Fort Lupton. He had L.P. Drake survey a town site in 1881, bought the land from the Union Pacific on 23 May 1882, and filed the plat that June. Fourth Street ran from the wagon road, now Denver Avenue, to the depot, which the townspeople built themselves.

George and John Twombly opened the first store at Denver Avenue and Fourth Street in 1882, and Winbourn’s Hotel Lupton went up at the other end of the block; it was demolished in 1977. Much of early Fort Lupton was built of Walter Ozment’s local bricks, which were alkaline and soft, so owners covered many of them with stucco. Residents petitioned for incorporation in 1889, and on 4 February 1890 Thomas C. Winbourn was sworn in as the first mayor. Wikipedia gives 15 January 1890 as the date of incorporation. The census counted 113 people in 1890 and 614 in 1910.

Milk, tomatoes and sugar

Fort Lupton lived on processing what the valley grew. A milk condensery started in 1901 and, under the Mohawk company from 1903, took 50,000 pounds of milk a day; Carnation bought it in 1921 and closed it in February 1950. In 1904 O.E. Frink added a cannery to his creamery, putting up tomatoes, catsup and corn. When he fell ill in 1907 his daughter Daisy went in his place to the first national canners’ convention, the only woman there; the City Museum now tells her story. Frink’s successors ran the Fort Lupton Canning Company until his grandson Ben Counter closed it in 1979. A second cannery, Empson’s and later Kuner’s, stood at Ninth Street.

In 1908 Frink sponsored a town festival, Tomato Day, with free tomatoes and barbecue for an estimated 3,000 people, Governor Henry Buchtel among them, with special trains from Denver. The City still holds the Tomato Festival at Trapper Days each September, and the library’s outreach page says it dates back over 115 years.

Sugar beets came next. The town pledged to raise $250,000 toward a factory of its own, and the Industrial Sugar Company opened in 1919 and 1920; Great Western bought it in 1925 and closed it in the 1940s, moving its new equipment to Brighton. The Ottesen Grain Company’s mill, built up from 1920, ran until 1975; the City’s designation register notes that it is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The people who did the work

The 2003 history gives a chapter to the families the fields and plants drew. Germans from Russia came to work the beets and many soon owned farms. Mexican workers began arriving in 1909, and in 1942 the U.S. Department of Agriculture built the Fort Lupton Farm Labor Camp east of town, 172 buildings with bungalows, cottages, a clinic and a nursery school. In 1969 residents and activists, among them Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, held rent strikes there; a judge ordered the camp closed that November, and most of its ground is now the Lancaster subdivision. Joe Martinez was mayor from 1976 to 1980. The museum has an exhibit on the labor camp.

Japanese families settled from 1902, among them the Kurokawa, Hayashida, Enomoto, Koshio, Eguchi and Miyamoto families, and by 1910 they farmed 3,000 acres around Brighton, Fort Lupton and Platteville. Kendo and other displays were part of Tomato Day in 1908. The Buddhist congregation dedicated its temple at Ninth Street and Main Avenue on 2 March 1940, built with help from neighbors outside it. During the Second World War Governor Ralph Carr invited Japanese American families to live freely in Colorado, and many came to Fort Lupton; the temple paid off its mortgage by 1943.

Highway, oil and gas

In 1916 the state made Denver Avenue part of the Denver-Greeley Highway, for years the only paved road in town, and filling stations soon lined it. In the 1930s J.S. and Edith Penfold opened a service station at Ninth Street that the 2003 history says is now House of Smoke. The road became US 85, and businesses took the name Midway, for a town 26 miles from Denver and 26 from Greeley.

From the 1950s oil and gas drilling spread across the Wattenberg and Spindle fields around town. The last wall of the original fort, part of a stock shed on the Ewing ranch, was demolished in 1981 by workers putting up drilling rigs; a truckload of its adobe bricks was saved. In 1993 Thermo Carbonics began a gas-fired power plant east of town whose waste heat warms acres of greenhouses.

Keeping the past

The library began in a church basement in 1921, and its 1929 building at First Street and McKinley Avenue, designed by John J. Huddart, became the Fort Lupton City Museum in 1993 and was given historic designation in 1996 (museum, library history). The public library merged with the high school’s library in 1975, by the library’s account, or 1976, by the museum’s, and opened a 16,000-square-foot building attached to the high school in December 1993.

The Historical Society began with a $30 gift from Cliff Lupton, a visitor from England, on 10 September 1987. It bought the 3.4-acre fort site in 1989, moved the Independence School and the Donelson house there, and broke ground on the fort in 2004; seven years, 25,000 volunteer hours and $220,000 later the rebuilt fort, with some of the original bricks in its walls, was finished in 2011 (Society history). The fort’s own page says the work began in 2003. The historic park now also has an 1850s trapper cabin moved from Adams County.

The City keeps eleven sites on its own register, from the Odd Fellows Lodge on Denver Avenue to the Ewing Barn, and Denver Avenue is still lined with early-20th-century commercial buildings (Historic Preservation). The census counted 2,489 people in 1970 and 7,955 in 2020; the City estimates 10,566 for 2025. Its new City Hall at Ninth Street and College Avenue, begun in September 2025, was nearing completion in late September 2026.