Silt: Garfield County's Last Town

This stretch of the Colorado River valley was once the territory of a settler named Ferguson, and through the eighteen eighties people called the area Ferguson in his honor. In eighteen eighty-nine, when the railroad built a depot nearby, the settlement took a new name from the silt deposits along the river: Silt. A post office opened in eighteen ninety-eight, and by nineteen fifteen the community incorporated as a proper town.

By that same year it could claim six dry-goods stores and two blacksmith shops. Through the nineteen thirties a full main street took shape: a bank, a lumber yard, a movie theater, a pool hall. Silt has stayed small, tucked between Glenwood Springs and Rifle along the valley floor, an agricultural town that never tried to be anything other than what the soil required.