Hudson: Where Irrigation Changed Everything

Hudson, Colorado began as a Union Pacific water and supply stop in eighteen eighty-three, one of the routine service points the railroad needed along its Denver to eastern Colorado line. John M. Lapp platted the townsite in eighteen eighty-seven for the Hudson City Land and Improvement Company, giving the settlement its name, and a second plat added three thousand more lots in eighteen eighty-nine during a brief land speculation boom.

The real transformation came in nineteen oh seven when the Henrylyn Municipal Irrigation District was formed, drawing South Platte River water across the dry grassland of southeastern Weld County. Roughly seventy-five farm families from Kansas and Oklahoma arrived between nineteen ten and nineteen thirteen, and Hudson was incorporated in nineteen fourteen. By nineteen thirty the district was irrigating more than thirty-four thousand acres of cropland. What had been a railroad water stop became the center of a working farm community, and that is what it remains today.