Timnath, Colorado

Timnath is a farming town on the Cache la Poudre River that carries one of the more unexpected names on the Front Range. Settlers began arriving here in eighteen sixty-nine and called the place Fairview, a thoroughly unremarkable name. In eighteen eighty-four a local Presbyterian minister was filling out the paperwork to register a post office and needed an official name.

He reached for his Bible, specifically the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Judges, and wrote Timnath, the Philistine town where Samson went to find a wife. No one recorded why he chose that particular passage. The name stuck.

The town incorporated in nineteen twenty and remained a quiet agricultural community for nearly a century before the sprawl of Fort Collins swept south and transformed it into one of the fastest-growing towns in Colorado.