Auraria: Denver's Forgotten Twin

When gold was found at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River in eighteen fifty-eight, two rival settlements sprang up almost simultaneously on opposite banks. Denver City claimed the east bank. Auraria, named for a gold-mining district in Georgia, claimed the west.

Auraria was actually the older settlement by a few weeks and for a short time the larger one. The two towns competed bitterly for merchants, newspapers, and settlers arriving from the east. In eighteen sixty they merged under the Denver name, and Auraria's identity was absorbed entirely.

Today the Auraria Higher Education Campus, a shared campus serving the University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University, and Community College of Denver, occupies the old Auraria townsite west of Cherry Creek. A handful of nineteenth-century buildings survive along Ninth Street, all that remains above ground of Denver's original twin city.