City of Lakewood

Lakewood is one of the strangest birth stories in American city-making. For most of its life it was just a sprawl of unincorporated suburb west of Denver. The name itself came from a subdivision laid out in eighteen eighty-nine by William Loveland, who ran the Colorado Central Railroad.

Then, in the nineteen sixties, residents grew afraid that Denver would simply annex them piece by piece. So they organized and voted to incorporate. When Lakewood became a city in nineteen sixty-nine, it already held more than ninety thousand people, which made it the largest community ever to incorporate at one stroke in the United States up to that time. It was first incorporated as Jefferson City, but voters soon renamed it Lakewood.