Littleton: The Flour Mill Town That Became Denver's South Shore

Littleton sits just south of Denver along the South Platte River, and its origins are as practical as its setting: a New Hampshire engineer arrived here during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, looked at the water, the soil, and the grade of the land, and decided to build a flour mill instead of digging for gold.

Richard Sullivan Little came to Colorado in eighteen fifty-nine to work on irrigation infrastructure. He recognized that the valley south of Denver was better suited to farming than mining, and in eighteen sixty-two his wife Angeline joined him. The town that grew around their homestead and took his name built its first major institution in eighteen sixty-seven, the Rough and Ready Flour Mill, which processed grain from the farms spreading across the valley. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived in eighteen seventy-one, connecting Littleton to markets and making it a functional commercial center. It incorporated as a town in eighteen ninety and became the permanent county seat of Arapahoe County in nineteen oh four.

For most of the twentieth century Littleton was a quiet suburb, but it carries a weight that few small cities do. The high school shooter attacks at nearby Columbine High School in April of nineteen ninety-nine, which killed thirteen people, put Littleton's name in the national vocabulary in the worst possible way. The community has since spent decades processing that event, and memorials in the area reflect that ongoing reckoning.

Today Littleton is one of the better-preserved examples of a South Denver streetcar suburb from the early nineteen hundreds. Its historic downtown along Main Street, with two-story brick commercial buildings from the eighteen eighties and nineties, survives largely intact and sits on the National Register of Historic Places as a reminder of what the South Platte River Valley looked like before the highway era reshaped everything around it.