Fountain, Colorado

Fountain is one of El Paso County's oldest towns, founded in eighteen fifty-nine in the same year as Denver and Colorado Springs, established as a railroad shipping point along Fountain Creek. It holds the oldest post office and oldest church in the county. In eighteen eighty-eight, the town was nearly destroyed when a freight train carrying about eighteen tons of explosives collided with a passenger train and blew up, killing three people and leaving a huge crater.

Fountain rebuilt and kept going. The town's next transformation came in nineteen forty-two, when the Army established Camp Carson on adjacent land after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Camp Carson became Fort Carson in nineteen fifty-four, named for the scout and soldier Kit Carson, and has shaped the character of the community ever since.

Fountain today is a working-class military town, defined as much by the soldiers next door as by its own long history.