Hugo: Division Point on the Empty Plains

Hugo sits on the high eastern Colorado plains where the Kansas Pacific Railroad arrived in May of eighteen seventy. The town is said to be named for Hugo Richards, an agent for the Halliday Overland Express stagecoach line, but it was the railroad that put Hugo on the map. The Kansas Pacific designated Hugo a division point, which meant it built a hotel, an eating house, a water tank, and a roundhouse there.

By the late eighteen eighties Hugo had become a significant cattle shipping point, and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad built a second line through on its way to Denver. When Lincoln County was carved out of Elbert and Bent counties in eighteen eighty-nine, Hugo won the county-seat election, a status it holds today. Its location at the crossroads of two railroads and the broad, empty grassland surrounding it made Hugo the commercial anchor for one of Colorado's most sparsely populated counties.