Fort Morgan, Colorado

Fort Morgan sits on the South Platte River where a military post once guarded the Overland Trail. The town itself was platted in eighteen eighty-four, just south of the old fort's ruins. It became a sugar-beet farming center on Colorado's eastern plains and the seat of Morgan County, named for that original frontier fort.

But the name most locals remember is Glenn Miller. The big-band leader moved here as a teenager in nineteen eighteen and played football and discovered music at Fort Morgan High School. The town still marks itself as the boyhood home of the man who would lead the most popular orchestra of the swing era, before his plane vanished over the English Channel in December, nineteen forty-four.