Laporte: The County Seat That Lost to the Railroad

Laporte, which means the door in French, sits in the Cache la Poudre River valley just north of Fort Collins, and for a decade it was the most important settlement in this part of Colorado. French fur trappers working the valley as early as eighteen twenty-eight named the river after a cache of gunpowder they buried here. A town company platted Colona at this spot in eighteen sixty, and the following year it was declared the seat of Larimer County, then renamed Laporte in eighteen sixty-two.

Antoine Janis, regarded as the first permanent white settler north of the Arkansas River in Colorado, lived here. Then the Overland Stage was discontinued in eighteen sixty-eight when the railroad bypassed the valley entirely. Without the stage, Laporte's strategic importance evaporated.

The county seat moved to the newly incorporated Fort Collins in the early eighteen seventies, and Laporte slipped back into the role of a small riverside community.