Colona: The Valley's First Railroad Stop
Near Ridgway, Colorado
Colona sits along the Uncompahgre River between Montrose and Ridgway, and settlers came to farm the rich bottomland on both sides of the river. The community dates its founding to eighteen eighty-seven, when the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad laid tracks through the valley, giving ranchers a way to ship cattle to eastern markets.
Local accounts say a developer named Richard Whinnerah platted a ten-block town for the Hotchkiss Brothers, and that a Methodist Episcopal church from Ouray was later moved here by wagon. Colona never grew into a major center, but it persisted as a quiet agricultural community. Today it is an unincorporated census-designated place, its fields and irrigation ditches much as they were when the cattle cars first rolled through more than a hundred and thirty years ago.
