Annie the Railroad Dog

This small grave belongs to Annie, the railroad dog of Fort Collins. In nineteen thirty-four, a brakeman with the Colorado and Southern Railway found a sick, half-starved mixed-breed dog outside a blacksmith shop in nearby Timnath. The crew brought her back to the freight depot here, nursed her to health, and named her Annie.

For the next fourteen years she became the town's unofficial welcome wagon, meeting the trains and greeting passengers as they stepped down onto the platform. When Annie died in nineteen forty-eight, the railroad men buried her just a few yards from her home and poured a small cement headstone by hand. Its epitaph reads, from Colorado and Southern men to Annie, our dog.

Fifty years later the town set a bronze statue of her in front of the library, and a yearly Annie dog walk still keeps her memory alive.