Sterling: Named for a Town in Illinois

Sterling, Colorado owes its name to a moment of homesickness. In eighteen seventy-one, a railroad official passed through the South Platte valley and set up a post office around eighteen seventy-four, which he named for his hometown of Sterling, Illinois. The Overland Trail had run through this land just a few years before, carrying emigrants west between eighteen sixty-two and eighteen sixty-eight.

The Union Pacific Railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-one, pulling the small settlement away from its original site to meet the tracks. Sterling filed for incorporation in eighteen eighty-four and became the county seat when Logan County was organized in eighteen eighty-seven. The real transformation came in nineteen oh five, when the Sterling Sugar Company opened a beet-processing factory and the Great Western Sugar Company bought it the following year. The town's population nearly tripled between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten, rising above three thousand. Today Sterling serves as the commercial hub of Colorado's northeastern plains, still surrounded by sugar beet and wheat fields.