General Palmer's Dream City

On a July afternoon in eighteen seventy-one, General William Jackson Palmer stood on a piece of benchland at the base of Pikes Peak and laid out the terms of a city. He was thirty-four years old, a Civil War veteran who had commanded a cavalry regiment and survived several captures. He had just finished driving the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad south from Denver, and the route needed a town.

But Palmer did not want an ordinary railroad town. He had ridden through the West and seen what ordinary railroad towns looked like: rough, saloon-heavy, speculative, and temporary. He wanted the opposite.

He called his vision a resort city for people of education and refinement. The original deed covenants for Colorado Springs lots included explicit prohibitions on the sale, production, or consumption of alcohol. Palmer was a Quaker by upbringing and a committed temperance man, and he baked those convictions directly into the land titles.

To fill the town with the right sort of resident, Palmer built the Antlers Hotel in eighteen eighty-three, a showplace intended to lure wealthy Easterners and Europeans. His railroad made the town accessible from anywhere. He gave land and support to Colorado College, established in eighteen seventy-four, just three years after he founded the city.

He laid out broad boulevards, reserved parks, and brought in water from the mountains. The English came in particular numbers, enough that people began calling the place Little London. Remittance men, the younger sons of British families who received stipends from home on the condition they stay far away, arrived alongside legitimate settlers.

Polo clubs formed. The city had a distinctly transatlantic tone. Palmer himself lived in a canyon just north of the city at a property he called Glen Eyrie, the eagle's valley, where he eventually built a sixty-seven-room Tudor stone castle for himself and, he hoped, for the wife who rarely stayed.