Springfield: Where Four States Almost Meet

Springfield is the seat of Baca County, tucked into the far southeastern corner of Colorado where the state shares borders with Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The four-state corner lies just a short drive from town. Springfield was founded in eighteen eighty-eight by settlers from Missouri who named it after Springfield, Missouri, where they came from.

The next year the Colorado legislature created Baca County, naming it for Felipe Baca, a prominent businessman and territorial legislator from Trinidad. Springfield became the county seat that same year. Baca County sits at the dry fringe of the Great Plains, and the region took heavy damage during the Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties, when the county population fell from over ten thousand to roughly six thousand in a single decade.

Springfield has held on as a ranching and farming community, the commercial center for one of the most remote stretches of Colorado.