Hillrose: A Name Turned Upside Down

Hillrose, Colorado has one of the more inventive origin stories among the small towns of the South Platte valley. The town grew up along a Burlington, Chicago and Quincy Railroad spur built to serve large ranches in Morgan County as a cattle-shipping center. When the Lincoln Land Company platted the site, a local woman named Katherine Emerson donated the land on two conditions: half the property had to be set aside for streets and parks, and the town had to be named after her children.

Her daughter was Rose Hill Emerson, so the town should have been called Rose Hill. But there was already a Rosehill in Colorado. The solution was simple: flip the words. Hillrose was incorporated on May twentieth, nineteen nineteen, becoming Morgan County's third incorporated town and still its smallest. The name is a reversal, but the place is real, a few dozen blocks of houses and grain-country quiet sitting where the spur line used to run.