Douglas County, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary, began with miners scouring the area for gold — which they didn’t find in any quantity.
One of 17 counties created in 1861, Douglas County then became a farming community.
The first county census, taken in 1870, tallied 1,388 residents. According to county statistics, the population was 296,374 as of Jan. 1.
Still, wide-open spaces and a rural feel remain part of the county, and it has been important to maintain that through designating open space, said Douglas County Commissioner Jack Hilbert.
“We’re still fairly rural,” Hilbert said. “What we’ve done is kept our density up in the north, so that’s how we can achieve that quality of life.”
Most early residents were commuters — they worked in the mines in the summertime and came back to stay the rest of the time on the plains.
“Think about it as camping all the time,” said Johanna Harden, archivist at the Philip S. Miller Library.
The county was mostly agricultural, with ranches and dairy farms, and had a considerably smaller population until Interstate 25 was built in the 1960s.
Since then, the county’s growth has exploded, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, but Hilbert said the county has been good at maintaining the agricultural foundation, at least in the southern portion of the county.
Agriculture may be a constant in the county’s history, but even that has changed. It used to be wheat, corn and cattle, and now it’s hay, cattle and horses.
Hilbert said the county has the fourth-largest population of horses and the largest population of high-end horses in the state.
Brooke Fox, president and chief executive of the Colorado Agricultural Leadership Foundation, said because of the local-food movement, there may be a resurgence of agriculture in the county.
“There’s definitely more opportunity for us to grow our own food in the county than there has been in the last 10 or 20 years,” Fox said.
