Brush, Colorado

Brush takes its name from Jared Brush, a prospector turned rancher who became lieutenant governor of Colorado. The town organized in eighteen eighty-two around the South Platte River crossing on the Texas-Montana cattle trail, where longhorn herds once grazed before shipping east. The brutal winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighteen eighty-seven, known as the Great Die-Up, wiped out open-range ranching across the plains, but Brush survived on irrigation farming from the South Platte.

By nineteen oh six, the Great Western Sugar Company had built a beet-processing plant here, and sugar beets defined the local economy for most of the twentieth century. The facility is long gone, but Brush remains an agricultural hub for Morgan County, sustained by the same river water that saved it when the cattle died.