Loveland: The Valentine City and the Sculpture Capital
Colorado
The city of Loveland was founded in eighteen seventy-seven by the Colorado Central Railroad and named for its president, William A. H. Loveland. It was a practical, agricultural decision: the railroad needed a service point on the line between Denver and Fort Collins, and the fertile land in the valley of the Big Thompson River offered enough promise for a town to survive without a railroad depot as its only anchor.
For most of its first century, Loveland was a sugar beet and agricultural town. The Great Western Sugar Company built a plant nearby in nineteen oh one, and the economy ran on the rhythm of the growing season. Irrigation from the Big Thompson gave the valley reliable water, and farms spread across the benchlands east of the mountains.
Two traditions transformed Loveland's identity in the twentieth century, and they have little to do with each other except that they both gave the city a distinctive national profile.
The first began in nineteen forty-seven. A postmaster and a group of volunteers started hand-stamping valentines with a special Loveland postmark and a short verse, then remailing them to recipients across the country. The custom grew until the Loveland post office was processing hundreds of thousands of cards each February, sent from all fifty states and dozens of countries by people who wanted the postmark to read Loveland, Colorado. The city leaned into it, and the Valentine re-mailing program is still running today.
The second transformation came from bronze. The Art Castings of Colorado Foundry, established in nineteen seventy-two, attracted sculptors who needed high-quality casting facilities near their studios. By the mid-nineteen eighties, a community of working sculptors had established itself in and around Loveland. The annual sculpture show in Benson Park became one of the largest outdoor sculpture exhibitions in the West. Today the city describes itself as the Sculpture Capital of Colorado, and that is not an empty claim. Original bronze works by nationally recognized artists sit on street corners and in parks throughout the city.
