Fort Junction: A Sod Wall Against the Plains
Near Boulder, Colorado
Two hundred feet east of this point, settlers once huddled behind walls of stacked sod. In eighteen sixty-four, pioneers from the Boulder and Saint Vrain Valleys built Fort Junction as a refuge from the violence that had consumed the eastern Colorado plains that year. It was not a military installation but a civilian enclosure, garrisoned by Home Guard volunteers, ordinary farmers and tradesmen who took turns standing watch.
Eighteen sixty-four was one of the most dangerous years on the Colorado frontier: the Sand Creek Massacre that November killed more than a hundred and fifty Cheyenne and Arapaho people, and retaliatory raids followed across the region. Settlements like this one were improvised responses to fear on all sides. The sod walls are long gone, dissolved back into the soil.
A state marker preserves the memory of what once stood here, and why.
